
Class 

Book 

GcpigtoN?.-. 







COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



6 ff 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 



WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR 



THE COLLEGE COURSE AND THE PREPARATION 
FOR LIFE 

CAN THE CHURCH SURVIVE IN THE CHANGING 
ORDER? 



PUBLISHED ON THE FOUNDATION 

ESTABLISHED IN MEMORY OF 

JAMES WESLEY COOPER 

OF THE CLASS OF 1865, YALE COLLEGE 



PREACHING AND 
PAGANISM 

BY 

ALBERT PARKER FITCH 

PROFESSOR OF THE HISTORY OF RELIGION 
IN AMHERST COLLEGE 




f^rvg^ 



THE FORTY-SIXTH SERIES OF THE 

LYMAN BEECHER LECTURESHIP ON PREACHING 

IN YALE UNIVERSITY 



NEW HAVEN 

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS 

MDCCCCXX 






COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY 
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS 



FIRST PUBLISHED, 1920 



3V -1 1320 



©CI.A601247 



PREFACE 

THE chief, perhaps the only, commendation of 
these chapters is that they pretend to no final 
solution of the problem which they discuss. 
How to assert the eternal and objective reality of that 
Presence, the consciousness of Whom is alike the begin- 
ning and the end, the motive and the reward, of the 
religious experience, is not altogether clear in an age that, 
for over two centuries, has more and more rejected the 
transcendental ideas of the human understanding. Yet 
the consequences of that rejection, in the increasing in- 
dividualism of conduct which has kept pace with the 
growing subjectivism of thought, are now sufficiently 
apparent and the present plight of our civilization is al- 
ready leading its more characteristic members, the politi- 
cal scientists and the economists, to reexamine and re- 
appraise the concepts upon which it is founded. It is a 
similar attempt to scrutinize and evaluate the significant 
aspects of the interdependent thought and conduct of our 
day from the standpoint of religion which is here at- 
tempted. Its sole and modest purpose is to endeavor to 
restore some neglected emphases, to recall to spiritually 
minded men and women certain half-forgotten values in 
the religious experience and to add such observations re- 
garding them as may, by good fortune, contribute some- 
thing to that future reconciling of the thought currents 
and value judgments of our day to these central and 
precious facts of the religious life. 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

Many men and minds have contributed to these pages. 
Such sources of suggestion and insight have been indi- 
cated wherever they could be identified. In especial I 
must record my grateful sense of obligation to Professor 
Irving Babbitt's Rousseau and Romanticism. The chapter 
on Naturalism owes much to its brilliant and provocative 
discussions. 



CONTENTS 

Page 

Preface 11 

I. The Learner, the Doer and the Seer 15 

II. The Children of Zion and the Sons of Greece 40 

III. Eating, Drinking and Being Merry 72 

IV. The Unmeasured Gulf 102 

V. Grace, Knowledge, Virtue 131 

VI. The Almighty and Everlasting God 157 

VII. Worship as the Chief Approach to Tran- 
scendence 184 

VIII. Worship and the Discipline of Doctrine .... 209 



CHAPTER ONE 
The Learner, the Doer and the Seer 

THE first difficulty which confronts the incum- 
bent of the Lyman Beecher Foundation, after 
he has accepted the appalling fact that he must 
hitch his modest wagon, not merely to a star, but rather 
to an entire constellation, is the delimitation of his sub- 
ject. There are many inquiries, none of them without 
significance, with which he might appropriately concern 
himself. For not only is the profession of the Christian 
ministry a many-sided one, but scales of value change 
and emphases shift, within the calling itself, with our 
changing civilization. The mediaeval world brought 
forth, out of its need, the robed and mitered ecclesiastic ; 
a more recent world, pursuant to its genius, demanded 
the ethical idealist. Drink-sodden Georgian England 
responded to the open-air evangelism of Whitefield and 
Wesley; the next century found the Established Church 
divided against itself by the learning and culture of 
the Oxford Movement. Sometimes a philosopher and 
theologian, like Edwards, initiates the Great Awakening; 
sometimes an emotional mystic like Bernard can arouse 
all Europe and carry men, tens of thousands strong, over 
the Danube and over the Hellespont to die for the Cross 
upon the burning sands of Syria; sometimes it is the 
George Herberts, in a hundred rural parishes, who make 
grace to abound through the intimate and precious min- 

15 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

istrations of the country parson. Let us, therefore, de- 
vote this chapter to a review of the several aspects of 
the Christian ministry, in order to set in its just perspec- 
tive the one which we have chosen for these discussions 
and to see why it seems to stand, for the moment, in the 
forefront of importance. Our immediate question is, 
Who, on the whole, is the most needed figure in the 
ministry today ? Is it the professional ecclesiastic, backed 
with the authority and prestige of a venerable organiza- 
tion? Is it the curate of souls, patient shepherd of the 
silly sheep? Is it the theologian, the administrator, the 
prophet — who ? 

One might think profitably on that first question in 
these very informal days. We are witnessing a break- 
down of all external forms of authority which, while 
salutary and necessary, is also perilous. Not many of 
us err, just now, by overmagnifying our official status. 
Many of us instead are terribly at ease in Zion and 
might become less assured and more significant by un- 
dertaking the subjective task of a study in ministerial 
personality. "What we are," to paraphrase Emerson, 
"speaks so loud that men cannot hear what we say." 
Every great calling has its characteristic mental attitude, 
the unwritten code of honor of the group, without a 
knowledge of which one could scarcely be an efficient 
or honorable practitioner within it. One of the perplex- 
ing and irritating problems of the personal life of the 
preacher today has to do with the collision between the 
secular standards of his time, this traditional code of 
his class, and the requirements of his faith. Shall he 
acquiesce in the smug conformities, the externalized 
procedures of average society, somewhat pietized, and 
join that large company of good and ordinary people, 
16 



THE LEARNER, THE DOER, THE SEER 

of whom Samuel Butler remarks, in The Way of All 
Flesh, that they would be "equally horrified at hearing 
the Christian religion doubted, or at seeing it practised ?" 
There are ministers who do thus content themselves with 
being merely superrespectable. Shall he exalt the stand- 
ards of his calling, accentuate the speech and dress, the 
code and manners of his group, the historic statements 
of his faith, at the risk of becoming an official, a "pro- 
fessional"? Or does he possess the insight, and can he 
acquire the courage, to follow men like Francis of As- 
sisi or Father Damien and adopt the Christian ethic 
and thus join that company of the apostles and martyrs 
whose blood is the seed of the church? A good deal 
might be said today on the need of this sort of personal 
culture in the ministerial candidate. But, provocative 
and significant though the question is, it is too limited 
in scope, too purely subjective in nature, to suit the char- 
acter and the urgency of the needs of this moment. 
' Again, every profession has the prized inheritance of 
its own particular and gradually perfected human skill. 
An interesting study, then, would be the analysis of that 
rich content of human insights, the result of generations 
of pastoral experience, which form the background of 
all great preaching. No man, whether learned or pious, 
or both, is equipped for the pulpit without the addition 
of that intuitive discernment, that quick and varied ap- 
preciation, that sane and tolerant knowledge of life and 
the world, which is the reward given to the friends and 
lovers of mankind. For the preacher deals not with the 
shallows but the depths of life. Like his Master he 
must be a great humanist. To make real sermons he has 
to look, without dismay or evasion, far into the heart's 
impenetrable recesses. He must have had some experi- 

17 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

ence with the absolutism of both good and evil. I think 
preachers who regard sermons on salvation as super- 
fluous have not had much experience with either. They 
belong to that large world of the intermediates, neither 
positively good nor bad, who compose the mass of the 
prosperous and respectable in our genteel civilization. 
Since they belong to it they cannot lead it. And certainly 
they who do not know the absolutism of evil cannot very 
well understand sinners. Genuine satans, as Milton knew, 
are not weaklings and traitors who have declined from 
the standards of a respectable civilization. They are posi- 
tive and impressive figures pursuing and acting up to their 
own ideal of conduct, not fleeing from self-accepted ret- 
ribution or falling away from a confessed morality of 
ours. Evil is a force even more than a folly ; it is a posi- 
tive agent busily building away at the City of Dreadful 
Night, constructing its insolent and scoffing society 
within the very precincts of the City of God. 

He must know, then, that evil and suffering are not 
temporary elements of man's evolution, just about to be 
eliminated by the new reform, the last formula, the fresh 
panacea. To those who have tasted grief and smelt the 
fire such easy preaching and such confident solutions are 
a grave offense. They know that evil is an integral part 
of our universe; suffering an enduring element of the 
whole. So he must preach upon the chances and changes 
of this mortal world, or go to the house of shame or 
the place of mourning, knowing that there is something 
past finding out in evil, something incommunicable about 
true sorrow. They are not external things, alien to our 
natures, that happen one day from without, and may 
perhaps be avoided, and by and by are gone. No ; that 
which makes sorrow, sorrow, and evil, evil, is their nat- 
18 



THE LEARNER, THE DOER, THE SEER 

uralness ; they well up from within, part of the very tex- 
ture of our consciousness. He knows you can never ex- 
press them, for truly to do that you would have to 
express and explain the entire world. It is not easy then 
to interpret the evil and suffering which are not external 
and temporary, but enduring and a part of the whole. 

So the preacher is never dealing with plain or uncom- 
plicated matters. It is his business to perceive the mys- 
tery of iniquity in the saint and to recognize the mystery 
of godliness in the sinner. It is his business to revere 
the child and yet watch him that he may make a man of 
him. He must say, so as to be understood, to those who 
balk at discipline, and rail at self-repression, and resent 
pain: you have not yet begun to live nor made the first 
step toward understanding the universe and yourselves. 
To avoid discipline and to blench at pain is to evade 
life. There are limitations, occasioned by the evil and 
the suffering of the world, in whose repressions men 
find fulfillment. When you are honest with yourself you 
will know what Dante meant when he said: 

" And thou shalt see those who 
Contented are within the fire; 
Because they hope to come, 
When e'er it may be, to the blessed people." 1 

It is his business, also, to be the comrade of his peers, 
and yet speak to them the truth in love ; his task to un- 
derstand the bitterness and assuage the sorrows of old 
age. I suppose the greatest influence a preacher ever ex- 
ercises, and a chief source of the material and insight of 
his preaching, is found in this intimate contact with liv- 
ing and suffering, divided and distracted men and 

1 The Divine Comedy: Hell; canto I. 

19 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

women. When strong men blench with pain and ex- 
quisite grief stirs within us at the sight and we can en- 
dure naught else but to suffer with them, when youth 
is blurred with sin, and gray heads are sick with shame 
and we, then, want to die and cry, O God ! forgive and 
save them or else blot me out of Thy book of life — for 
who could bear to live in a world where such things are 
the end! — then, through the society of sorrow, and the 
holy comradeship in shame, we begin to find the Lord 
and to understand both the kindness and the justice of 
His world. In the moment when sympathy takes the 
bitterness out of another's sorrow and my suffering 
breaks the captivity of my neighbor's sin — then, when 
because "together," with sinner and sufferer, we come 
out into the quiet land of freedom and of peace, we per- 
ceive how the very heart of God, upon which there we 
know we rest, may be found in the vicarious suffering 
and sacrifice called forth by the sorrow and the evil of 
mankind. Then we can preach the Gospel. Because then 
we dimly understand why men have hung their God upon 
the Cross of Christ! 

Is it not ludicrous, then, to suppose that a man merely 
equipped with professional scholarship, or contented 
with moral conformities, can minister to the sorrow and 
the mystery, the mingled shame and glory of a human 
being? This is why the average theologue, in his first 
parish, is like the well-meaning but meddling engineer 
endeavoring with clumsy tools and insensitive fingers to 
adjust the delicate and complicated mechanism of a Ge- 
nevan watch. And here is one of the real reasons why we 
deprecate men entering our calling, without both the cul- 
ture of a liberal education and the learning of a graduate 
school. Clearly, therefore, one real task of such schools 



THE LEARNER, THE DOER, THE SEER 

and their lectureships is to offer men wide and gracious 
training in the art of human contacts, so that their lives 
may be lifted above Pharisaism and moral self-con- 
sciousness, made acquainted with the higher and compre- 
hensive interpretations of the heart and mind of our 
race. For only thus can they approach life reverently 
and humbly. Only thus will they revere the integrity of 
the human spirit ; only thus can they regard it with a 
magnanimous and catholic understanding and measure 
it not by the standards of temperamental or sectarian 
convictions, but by what is best and highest, deepest and 
holiest in the race. No one needs more than the young 
preacher to be drawn out of the range of narrow judg- 
ments, of exclusive standards and ecclesiastical traditions 
and to be flung out among free and sensitive spirits, that 
he may watch their workings, master their perceptions, 
catch their scale of values. 

A discussion, then, dealing with this aspect of our 
problem, would raise many and genuine questions for 
us. There is the more room for it in this time of increas- 
ing emphasis upon machinery when even ministers are 
being measured in the terms of power, speed and utility. 
These are not real ends of life; real ends are unity, re- 
pose, the imaginative and spiritual values which make 
for the release of self, with its by-product of happiness. 
In such days, then, when the old-time pastor-preacher 
is becoming as rare as the former general practitioner; 
when the lines of division between speaker, educator, 
expert in social hygiene, are being sharply drawn — as 
though new methods insured of themselves fresh inspi- 
ration, and technical knowledge was identical with spirit- 
ual understanding — it would be worth while to dwell upon 
the culture of the pastoral office and to show that inge- 
21 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

nuity is not yet synonymous with insight, and that, in our 
profession at least, card-catalogues cannot take the place 
of the personal study of the human heart. But many 
discussions on this Foundation, and recently those of 
Dr. Jowett, have already dealt with this sort of analysis. 
Besides, today, when not merely the preacher, but the 
very view of the world that produced him, is being 
threatened with temporary extinction, such a theme, 
poetic and rewarding though it is, becomes irrelevant 
and parochial. 

Or we might turn to the problem of technique, that 
professional equipment for his task as a sermonizer and 
public speaker which is partly a native endowment and 
partly a laborious acquisition on the preacher's part. 
Such was President Tucker's course on The Making and 
Unmaking of the Preacher. Certainly observations on 
professional technique, especially if they should include, 
like his, acute discussion of the speaker's obligation to 
honesty of thinking, no less than integrity of conduct; 
of the immorality of the pragmatic standard of mere 
effectiveness or immediate efficiency in the selection of 
material; of the aesthetic folly and ethical dubiety of 
simulated extempore speaking and genuinely impromptu 
prayers, would not be superfluous. But, on the other hand, 
we may hope to accomplish much of this indirectly today. 
Because there is no way of handling specifically either 
the content of the Christian message or the problem of 
the immediate needs and temper of those to whom it is 
to be addressed, without reference to the kind of per- 
sonality, and the nature of the tools at his disposal, which 
is best suited to commend the one and to interpret the 
other. 

Hence such a discussion as this ought, by its very scale 



THE LEARNER, THE DOER, THE SEER 

of values — by the motives that inform it and the ends 
that determine it — to condemn thereby the insincere and 
artificial speaker, or that pseudo-sermon which is neither 
as exposition, an argument nor a meditation but a mosaic, 
a compilation of other men's thoughts, eked out by im- 
possibly impressive or piously sentimental anecdotes, the 
whole glued together by platitudes of the Martin Tupper 
or Samuel Smiles variety. It is certainly an obvious but 
greatly neglected truth that simplicity and candor in pub- 
lic speaking, largeness of mental movement, what Phil- 
lips Brooks called direct utterance of comprehensive 
truths, are indispensable prerequisites for any significant 
ethical or spiritual leadership. But, taken as a main 
theme, this third topic, like the others, seems to me in- 
sufficiently inclusive to meet our present exigencies. It 
deals more with the externals than with the heart of our 
subject. 

Again we might address ourselves to the ethical and 
practical aspects of preaching and the ministry. Taking 
largely for granted our understanding of the Gospel, we 
might concern ourselves with its relations to society, the 
detailed implications for the moral and economic prob- 
lems of our social and industrial order. Dean Brown, 
in The Social Message of the Modern Pulpit, and Dr. 
Coffin in In a Day of Social Rebuilding, have so enriched 
this Foundation. Moreover, this is, at the moment, an 
almost universally popular treatment of the preacher's 
opportunity and obligation. One reason, therefore, for 
not choosing this approach to our task is that the 
preacher's attention, partly because of the excellence of 
these and other books and lectures, and partly because 
of the acuteness of the political-industrial crisis which is 
now upon us, is already focused upon it. 

23 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

Besides, our present moment is changing with an omi- 
nous rapidity. And one is not sure whether the immediate 
situation, as distinguished from that of even a few years 
ago, calls us to be concerned chiefly with the practical and 
ethical aspects of our mission, urgent though the need 
and critical the pass, to which the abuses of the capital- 
istic system have brought both European and American 
society. In this day of those shifting standards which 
mark the gradual transference of power from one group 
to another in the community, and the merging of a spent 
epoch in a new order, neither the chief opportunity nor 
the most serious peril of religious leadership is met by 
fresh and energetic programs of religion in action. In 
such days, our chief gift to the world cannot be the sup- 
port of any particular reforms or the alliance with any 
immediate ethical or economic movement. For these 
things at best would be merely the effects of religion. And 
it is not religion in its relations, nor even in its expression 
in character — it is the thing in itself that this age most 
needs. What men are chiefly asking of life at this mo- 
ment is not, What ought we to do ? but the deeper ques- 
tion, What is there we can believe? For they know that 
the answer to this question would show us what we ought 
to do. 

Nor do our reform alliances and successive programs 
and crusades always seem to me to proceed from any 
careful estimate of the situation as a whole or to be con- 
ceived in the light of comprehensive Christian principle. 
Instead, they sometimes seem to draw their inspiration 
more from the sense of the urgent need of presenting 
to an indifferent or disillusioned world some quick and 
tangible evidence of a continuing moral vigor and spirit- 
ual passion to which the deeper and more potent wit- 
24 



THE LEARNER, THE DOER, THE SEER 

nesses are absent. It is as though we thought the ma- 
chinery of the church w6uld revolve with more energy 
if geared into the wheels of the working world. But that 
world and we do not draw our power from the same 
dynamo. And surely in a day of profound and wide- 
spread mental ferment and moral restlessness, some more 
fundamental gift than this is asked of us. 

If, therefore, these chapters pay only an incidental at- 
tention to the church's social and ethical message, it is 
partly because our attention is, at this very moment, 
largely centered upon this important, yet secondary mat- 
ter, and more because there lies beneath it a yet more 
urgent and inclusive task which confronts the spokesman 
of organized religion. 

You will expect me then to say that we are to turn to 
some speculative and philosophic study, such as the 
analysis of the Christian idea in its world relationships, 
some fresh statement of the Gospel, either by way of apo- 
logia for inherited concepts, or as attempting to make a 
new receptacle for the living wine, which has indeed 
burst the most of its ancient bottles. Such was Principal 
Fairbairn's monumental task in The Place of Christ in 
Modern Theology and also Dr. Gordon's in his distin- 
guished discussions in The Ultimate Conceptions of Faith. 

Here, certainly, is an endeavor which is always of pri- 
mary importance. There is an abiding peril, forever 
crouching at the door of ancient organizations, that they 
shall seek refuge from the difficulties of thought in the 
opportunities of action. They need to be continually re- 
minded that reforms begin in the same place where 
abuses do, namely, in the notion of things ; that only just 
ideas can, in the long run, purify conduct; that clear 
thinking is the source of all high and sustained feeling. 

25 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

I wish that we might essay the philosopher-theologian's 
task. This generation is hungry for understanding; it 
perishes for lack of knowledge. One reason for the in- 
dubitable decline of the preacher's power is that we have 
been culpably indifferent in maintaining close and 
friendly alliances between the science and the art, the 
teachers and the practitioners of religion. Few things 
would be more ominous than to permit any further 
widening of the gulf which already exists between these 
two. Never more than now does the preacher need to 
be reminded of what Marcus Aurelius said: "Such as 
are thy habitual thoughts, such also shall be thyself ; for 
the soul is dyed by its thoughts." 

But such an undertaking, calling for wide and exact 
scholarship, large reserves of extra-professional learn- 
ing, does not primarily belong to a discussion within the 
department of practical theology. Besides which there 
is a task, closely allied to it, but creative rather than crit- 
ical, prophetic rather than philosophic, which does fall 
within the precise area of this field. I mean the endeavor 
to describe the mind and heart of our generation, ap- 
praise the significant thought-currents of our time. This 
would be an attempt to give some description of the chief 
impulses fermenting in contemporary society, to ask 
what relation they hold to the Christian principle, and 
to inquire what attitude toward them our preaching 
should adopt. If it be true that what is most revealing 
in any age is its regulative ideas, then what is more valu- 
able for the preacher than to attempt the understand- 
ing of his generation through the defining of its ruling 
concepts? And it is this audacious task which, for two 
reasons, we shall presume to undertake. 

The first reason is that it is appropriate both to the 
26 



THE LEARNER, THE DOER, THE SEER 

temperament and the training of the preacher. There are 
three grand divisions, or rather determining emphases, 
by which men may be separated into vocational groups. 
To begin with, there is the man of the scientific or in- 
tellectual type. He has a passion for facts and a 
strong sense of their reality. He moves with natural ease 
among abstract propositions, is both critical of, and fer- 
tile in, theories; indicates his essential distinction in his 
love of the truth for the truth's sake. He looks first to 
the intrinsic reasonableness of any proposition ; tends to 
judge both men and movements not by traditional or 
personal values, but by a detached and disinterested ap- 
praisal of their inherent worth. He is often a dogmatist, 
but this fault is not peculiar to him, he shares it with the 
rest of mankind. He is sometimes a literalist and some- 
times a slave to logic, more concerned with combating the 
crude or untenable form of a proposition than inquiring 
with sympathetic insight into the worth of its substance. 
But these things are perversions of his excellencies, de- 
fects of his virtues. His characteristic qualities are men- 
tal integrity, accuracy of statement, sanity of judgment, 
capacity for sustained intellectual toil. Such men are in- 
vestigators, scholars; when properly blended with the 
imaginative type they become inventors and teachers. 
They make good theologians and bad preachers. 

Then there are the practical men, beloved of our 
American life. Both their feet are firmly fixed upon the 
solid ground. They generally know just where they are, 
which is not surprising, for they do not, for the most 
part, either in the world of mind or spirit, frequent un- 
usual places. The finespun speculations of the philoso- 
phers and the impractical dreams of the artist make 
small appeal to them ; the world they live in is a sharply 
27 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

defined and clearly lighted and rather limited place. They 
like to say to this man come and he cometh, and to that 
man go and he goeth. They are enamored of offices, 
typewriters, telegrams, long-distance messages, secre- 
taries, programs, conferences and drives. Getting results 
is their goal; everything is judged by the criterion of 
effective action; they are instinctive and unconscious 
pragmatists. They make good cheer leaders at football 
games in their youth and impressive captains of industry 
in their old age. Their virtues are wholesome, if obvious ; 
they are good mixers, have shrewd judgment, immense 
physical and volitional energy. They understand that two 
and two make four. They are rarely saints but, unlike 
many of us who once had the capacity for sainthood, 
they are not dreadful sinners. They are the tribe of which 
politicians are born but, when they are blended with 
imaginative and spiritual gifts, they become philan- 
thropists and statesmen, practical servants of mankind. 
They make good, if conservative, citizens ; kind, if unin- 
spiring, husbands and deplorable preachers. 

Then there are those fascinating men of feeling and 
imagination, those who look into their own hearts and 
write, those to whom the inner dominions which the 
spirit conquers for itself become a thousand-fold more 
real than the earth whereon they stamp their feet. These 
are the literary or the creative folk. Their passion is not 
so much to know life as to enjoy it; not to direct it, but 
to experience it; not even to make understanding of it 
an end, but only a means to interpreting it. They do not, 
as a rule, thirst for erudition, and they are indifferent to 
those manipulations of the externals of life which are 
dear to the lovers of executive power. They know less 
but they understand more than their scholastic brethren. 
28 



THE LEARNER, THE DOER, THE SEER 

As a class they are sometimes disreputable but nearly 
always unworldly; more distinguished by an intuitive 
and childlike than by an ingenious or sophisticated qual- 
ity of mind. Ideas and facts are perceived by them not 
abstractly nor practically, but in their typical or symbolic, 
hence their pictorial and transmissible, aspects. They read 
dogma, whether theological or other, in the terms of a 
living process, unconsciously translating it, as they go 
along, out of its cold propositions into its appropriate 
forms of feeling and needs and satisfactions. 

The scientist, then, is a critic, a learner who wants to 
analyze and dissect; the man of affairs is a director and 
builder and wants to command and construct; the man 
of this group is a seer. He is a lover and a dreamer; 
he watches and broods over life, profoundly feeling it, 
enamored both of its shame and of its glory. The in- 
tolerable poignancy of existence is bittersweet to his 
mouth; he craves to incarnate, to interpret its entire hu- 
man process, always striving to pierce to its center, to 
capture and express its inexpressible ultimate. He is an 
egotist but a valuable one, acutely aware of the depths 
and immensities of his own spirit and of its significant 
relations to this seething world without. Thus it is both 
himself and a new vision of life, in terms of himself, 
that he desires to project for his community. 

The form of that vision will vary according to the na- 
ture of the tools, the selection of material, the particular 
sort of native endowment which are given to him. Some 
such men reveal their understanding of the soul and the 
world in the detached serenity, the too well-defined har- 
monies of a Parthenon ; others in the dim and intricate 
richness, the confused and tortured aspiration of the long- 
limbed saints and grotesque devils of a Gothic cathedral. 
29 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

Others incarnate it in gleaming bronze; or spread it in 
subtle play of light and shade and tones of color on a 
canvas ; or write it in great plays which open the dark 
chambers of the soul and make the heart stand still; or 
sing it in sweet and terrible verse, full-throated utterance 
of man's pride and hope and passion. Some act it before 
the altar or beneath the proscenium arch ; some speak it, 
now in Cassandra-tones, now comfortably like shepherds 
of frail sheep. These folk are the brothers-in-blood, the 
fellow craftsmen of the preacher. By a silly convention, 
he is almost forbidden to consult with them, and to be- 
take himself to the learned, the respectable and the dull. 
But it is with these that naturally he sees eye to eye. 

In short, in calling the preacher a prophet we mean^ 
that preaching is an art and the preacher is an artist; 
for all great art has the prophetic quality. Many men 
object to this definition of the "preacher as being profane. 
It appears to make secular or mechanicalize their pro- 
fession, to rob preaching of its sacrosanctity, leave it 
less authority by making it more intelligible, remove it 
from the realm of the mystical and unique. This objec- 
tion seems to me sometimes an expression of spiritual 
arrogance and sometimes a subtle form of skepticism. It 
assumes a special privilege for our profession or a not- 
get-at-able defense and sanction by insisting that it dif- 
fers in origin and hence in kind from similar expressions 
of the human spirit. It hesitates to rely on the normal 
and the intelligible sources of ministerial power, to con- 
fess the relatively definable origin and understandable 
methods of our work. It fears to trust to these alone. 

But all these must be trusted. We may safely assert 
that the preacher deals with absolute values, for all art 
does that. But we may not assert that he is the only per- 

30 



THE LEARNER, THE DOER, THE SEER 

son that does so or that his is the only or the unapproach- 
able way. No ; he, too, is an artist. Hence, a sermon is 
not a contribution to, but an interpretation of, knowledge, 
made in terms of the religious experience. It is taking 
truth out of its compressed and abstract form, its im- 
personal and scientific language, and returning it to life 
in the terms of the ethical and spiritual experience of 
mankind, thus giving it such concrete and pictorial ex- 
pression that it stimulates the imagination and moves the 
will. 

It will be clear then why I have said that the task of 
appraising the heart and mind of our generation, to 
.which we address ourselves, is appropriate to the preach- 
ing genius. For only they could attempt such a task who 
possess an informed and disciplined yet essentially intui- 
tive spirit with its scale of values; who by instinct can 
see their age as a whole and indicate its chief emphases, 
its controlling tendencies, its significant expressions. It 
is not the scientist but the seer who thus attempts the 
precious but perilous task of making the great general- 
izations. This is what Aristotle means when he says, 
"The poet ranks higher than the historian because he 
achieves a more general truth." This is, I suppose, what 
Houston Stewart Chamberlain means when he says, in 
the introduction to the Foundations of the Nineteenth 
Century: "our modern world represents an immeasura- 
ble array of facts. The mastery of such a task as record- 
ing and interpreting them scientifically is impossible. It 
is only the genius of the artist, which feels the secret 
parallels that exist between the world of vision and of 
thought, that can, if fortune be favorable, reveal the 
unity beneath the immeasurable complexities and diver- 
sities of the present order." Or as Professor Hocking 

3i 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

says: "The prophet must find in the current of history 
a unity corresponding to the unity of the physical uni- 
verse, or else he must create it. It is this conscious uni- 
fication of history that the religious will spontaneously 
tends to bring about." 1 

It is then precisely the preacher's task, his peculiar 
office, to attempt these vast and perilous summations. 
What he is set here for is to bring the immeasurable 
within the scope of vision. He deals with the far-flung 
outposts, no man knows how distant, and the boundless 
interspaces of human consciousness ; he deals with the 
beginning, the middle, the end — the origin, the meaning 
and the destiny — of human life. How can anyone give 
unity to such a prospect? Like any other artist he gives 
it the only unity possible, the unity revealed in his own 
personality. The theologian should not attempt to evalu- 
ate his age; the preacher may. Because the theologian, 
like any other scientist, analyzes and dissects ; he breaks 
up the world. The preacher in his disciplined imagina- 
tion, his spiritual intuitiveness, — what we call the "reli- 
gious temperament," — unites it again and makes men see 
it whole. This quality of purified and enlightened imagi- 
nation is of the very essence of the preacher's power 
and art. Hence he may attempt to set forth a just under- 
standing of his generation. 

This brings us to the second reason for our topic, 
namely, its timeliness. All religious values are not at all 
times equal in importance. As generations come and go, 
first one, then another looms in the foreground. But I 
sincerely believe that the most fateful undertaking for 
the preacher at this moment is that of analyzing his own 
generation. Because he has been flung into one of the 

1 The Meaning of God in Human Experience, p. 518. 
32 



THE LEARNER, THE DOER, THE SEER 

world's transition epochs, he speaks in an hour which 
is radical in changes, perplexing in its multifarious cross- 
currents, prolific of new forms and expressions. What 
the world most needs at such a moment of expansion and 
rebellion, is a redefining of its ideals. It needs to have 
.some eternal scale of values set before it once more. It 
needs to stop long enough to find out just what and 
where it is, and toward what it is going. It needs another 
Sheridan to write a new School for Scandal, another 
Swift, with his Gulliver's Travels, a continuing Shaw 
with his satiric comedies, a Mrs. Wharton with her 
House of Mirth, a Thorstein Veblen with his Higher 
Learning in America, a Savonarola with his call to re- 
pentance and indictment of worldly and unfaithful liv- 
ing. It is a difficult and dangerous office, this of the 
prophet; it calls for a considerate and honest mind as 
well as a flashing insight and an eager heart. The false 
prophet exposes that he may exploit his age; the true 
prophet portrays that he may purge it. Like Jeremiah 
we may well dread to undertake the task, yet its day 
and hour are upon us ! 

I have already spoken to this point at length, in a 
little book recently published. I merely add here 
that in a day of obvious political disillusionment and in- 
dustrial revolt, of intellectual rebellion against an out- 
worn order of ideas and of moral restlessness and doubt, 
an indispensable duty for the preacher is this compre- 
hensive study and understanding of his own epoch. Else, 
without realizing it, — and how true this often is, — he 
proclaims a universal truth in the unintelligible language 
of a forgotten order, and applies a timeless experience 
to the faded conditions of yesterday. 

Indeed, I am convinced that a chief reason why 

33 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

preaching is temporarily obscured in power, is because 
most of our expertness in it is in terms of local prob- 
lems, of partial significances, rather than in the wider 
tendencies that produce and carry them, or in the ulti- 
mate laws of conduct which should govern them. We 
ought to be troubled, I think, in our present ecclesiasti- 
cal situation, with its taint of an almost frantic immedi- 
acy. Not only are we not sufficiently dealing with the 
Gospel as a universal code, but, as both cause and effect 
of this, we are not applying it to the inclusive life of our 
generation. We are tinkering here and patching there, 
but attempting no grand evaluation. We have already 
granted that sweeping generalizations, inclusive esti- 
mates, are as difficult as they are audacious. Yet we have 
also seen that these grand evaluations are of the very 
essence of religion and hence are characteristic of the 
preacher's task. And, finally, it appears that ours is an 
age which calls for such redefining of its values, some 
fresh and inclusive moral and religious estimates. Hence 
we undertake the task. 

There remains but one thing more to be accomplished 
in this chapter. The problem of the selection and ar- 
rangement of the material for such a summary is not an 
easy one. Out of several possible devices I have taken 
as the framework on which to hang these discussions 
three familiar divisions of thought and feeling, with 
their accompanying laws of conduct, and value judg- 
ments. They are the humanistic or classic ; the naturalis- 
tic or primitive ; and the religious or transcendent inter- 
pretation of the world and life. One sets up a social, 
one an individual, and one a universal standard. Under 
the movements which these headings represent we can 
most easily and clearly order and appraise the chief in- 

34 



THE LEARNER, THE DOER, THE SEER 

fluences of the Protestant centuries. The first two are 
largely preempting between them, at this moment, the 
field of human thought and conduct and a brief analysis 
of them, contrasting their general attitudes, may serve 
as a fit introduction to the ensuing chapter. 

We begin, then, with the humanist. He is the man who 
ignores, as unnecessary, any direct reference to, or con- 
nection with, ultimate or supernatural values. He lives in 
a high but self-contained world. His is man's universe. 
His law is the law of reasonable self-discipline, founded 
on observation of nature and a respect for social values, 
and buttressed by high human pride. He accepts the 
authority of the collective experience of his generation or 
his race. He believes, centrally, in the trustworthiness of 
human nature, in its group capacity. Men, as a race, have 
intelligently observed and experimented with both them- 
selves and the world about them. Out of centuries of 
critical reflection and sad and wise endeavor, they have 
evolved certain criteria of experience. These summations 
could hardly be called eternal laws but they are 
standards ; they are the permits and prohibitions for hu- 
man life. Some of them affect personal conduct and are 
moral standards; some of them affect civil government 
and are political axioms ; some of them affect production 
and distribution and are economic laws; some of them 
affect social relationships. But in every case the human- 
ist has what is, in a sense, an objective because a formal 
standard; he looks without himself as an individual, yet 
to himself as a part of the composite experience and 
wisdom of his race, for understanding and for guides. 
Thus the individual conforms to the needs and wisdom 
of the group. Humanism, at its best, has something 
heroic, unselfish, noble about it. Its votaries do not eat 

35 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

to their liking nor drink to their thirst. They learn deep 
lessons almost unconsciously; to conquer their desires, 
to make light of toil and pain and discomfort; the true 
humanist is well aware that Spartan discipline is incom- 
parably superior to Greek accidence. This is what one of 
the greatest of them, Goethe, meant when he said : "Any- 
thing which emancipates the spirit without a correspond- 
ing growth in self-mastery is pernicious." 
^All humanists then have two characteristics in com- 
mon: first, they assume that man is his own arbiter, 
has both the requisite intelligence and the moral ability 
to control his own destiny; secondly, they place the 
source and criterion of this power in collective wisdom, 
not in individual vagary and not in divine revelation. 
They assert, therefore, that the law of the group, the per- 
fected and wrought out code of human experience, is all 
that is binding and all that is essential. To be sure, and 
most significantly, this authority is not rigid, complete, 
fixed. There is nothing complete in the humanist's world. 
Experience accumulates and man's knowledge grows; 
the expectation and joy in progress is a part of it ; man's 
code changes, emends, expands with his onward march- 
ing. But the humanistic point of view assumes something 
relatively stable in life. Hence our phrase that humanism 
gives us a classic, that is to say, a simple and established 
standard. 

It is to be observed that there is nothing in humanism 
thus defined which need be incompatible with religion. 
It is not with its content but its incompleteness that we 
quarrel. Indeed, in its assertion of the trustworthiness 
of human experience, its faith in the dignity and signifi- 
cance of man, its respect for the interests of the group, 
and its conviction that man finds his true self only out- 

36 



THE LEARNER, THE DOER, THE SEER 

side his immediate physical person, beyond his material 
wants and desires, it is quite genuinely a part of the re- 
ligious understanding. But we shall have occasion to ob- 
serve that while much of this may be religious this is not 
the whole of religion. For the note of universality is 
absent. Humanism is essentially aristocratic. It is for a 
selected group that it is practicable and it is a selected 
experience upon which it rests. Its standards are eso- 
teric rather than democratic. Yet it is hardly necessary 
to point out the immense part which humanism, as thus 
defined, is playing in present life. 

But there is another law which, from remotest times, 
man has followed whenever he dared. It is not the law 
of the group but of the individual, not the law of civili- 
zation but of the jungle. "Most men," says Aristotle, 
"would rather live in a disorderly than a sober manner." 
He means that most men would rather consult and grat- 
ify their immediate will, their nearest choices, their in- 
stantaneous desires, than conform the moment to some 
regulated and considerate, some comprehensive scheme 
of life and action. The life of unreason is their desire; 
the experience whose bent is determined by every whim, 
the expression which has no rational connection with 
the past and no serious consideration for the future. 
This is of the very essence of lawlessness because it is 
revolt against the normal sequence of law and effect, in 
mind and conduct, in favor of untrammeled adventure. 

Now this is naturalism or paganism as we often calf 
it. Naturalism is a perversion of that high instinct in 
mankind which issues in the old concept of supernat- 
uralism. The supernaturalist, of a former and discredited 
type, believed that God violates the order of nature for 
sublime ends; that He "breaks into" His own world, so 

37 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

to speak, "revealing" Himself in prodigious, inexplicable, 
arbitrary ways. By a sort of degradation of this notion, 
a perversion of this instinct, the naturalist assumes that 
he can violate both the human and the divine law for 
personal ends, and express himself in fantastic or in- 
decent or impious ways. The older supernaturalism exalts 
the individualism of the Creator; naturalism the egotism 
of the creature. I make the contrast not merely to exco- 
riate naturalism, but to point out the interdependence be- 
tween man's apparently far-separated expressions of 
his spirit, and how subtly misleading are our highly 
prized distinctions, how dangerous sometimes that sec- 
ondary mental power which multiplies them. It sobers 
and clarifies human thinking a little, perhaps, to reflect 
on how thin a line separates the sublime and the ridicu- 
lous, the saint and the sensualist, the martyr and the 
fool, the genius and the freak. 

Now, with this selfish individualism which we call nat- 
uralism we shall have much to do, for it plays an increas- 
ing role in the modern world; it is the neo-paganism 
which we may see spreading about us. Sophistries of all 
kinds become the powerful allies of this sort of moral 
and aesthetic anarchy. Its votaries are those sorts of 
rebels who invariably make their minds not their friends 
but their accomplices. They are ingenious in the art of 
letting themselves go and at the same time thinking them- 
selves controlled and praiseworthy. The naturalist, then, 
ignores the group ; he flaunts impartially both the classic 
and the religious law. He is equally unwilling to submit 
to a power imposed from above and without, or to accept 
those restrictions of society, self-imposed by man's own 
codified and corrected observations of the natural world 
and his own impulses. He jeers at the one as hypocrisy 

38 



THE LEARNER, THE DOER, THE SEER 

and superstition and at the other as mere "middle-class 
respectability." He himself is the perpetual Ajax stand- 
ing defiant upon the headland of his own inflamed de- 
sires, and scoffing at the lightnings either of heaven or 
society. Neither devoutness nor progress but mere per- 
sonal expansion is his goal. The humanist curbs both the 
flesh and the imagination by a high doctrine of expedi- 
ency. Natural values are always critically appraised in 
the light of humane values, which is nearly, if not quite, 
the same as saying that the individual desires and de- 
lights must be conformed to the standards of the group. 
There can be no anarchy of the imagination, no license 
of the mind, no unbridled will. Humanism, no less than 
religion, is nobly, though not so deeply, traditional. But 
there is no tradition to the naturalist; not the normal 
and representative, but the unique and spectacular is his 
goal. Novelty and expansion, not form and proportion, 
are his goddesses. Not truth and duty, but instinct and 
appetite, are in the saddle. He will try any horrid experi- 
ment from which he may derive a new sensation. 

Over against them both stands the man of religion 
with his vision of the whole and his consequent law of 
proud humility. The next three chapters will try to dis- 
cuss in detail these several attitudes toward life and their 
respective manifestations in contemporary society. 



39 



CHAPTER TWO 
The Children of Zion and the Sons of Greece 

WE are not using the term "humanism" in this 
chapter in its strictly technical sense. Be- 
cause we are not concerned with the history 
of thought merely, but also with its practical embodi- 
ments in various social organizations as well. So we 
mean by "humanism" not only those modes and 
systems of thought in which human interests predomi- 
nate but also the present economic, political and eccle- 
siastical institutions which more or less consistently ex- 
press them. Hence, the term as used will include concepts 
not always agreeing with each other, and sometimes only 
semi-related to the main stream of the movement. This 
need not trouble us. Strict intellectual consistency is a 
fascinating and impossible goal of probably dubious 
value. Moreover, it is this whole expression of the time 
spirit which bathes the sensitive personality of the 
preacher, persuading and moulding him quite as much 
by its derived and concrete manifestations in contempo- 
rary society as by its essential and abstract principles. 

There are then two sets of media through which hu- 
manism has affected preaching. The first are philosophi- 
cal and find their expression in a large body of literature 
which has been moulding thought and feeling for nearly 
four centuries. Humanism begins with the general 
abstract assumption that all which men can know, or 
40 



CHILDREN OF ZION AND SONS OF GREECE 

need to know, are "natural" and human values ; that they 
have no means of getting outside the inexorable circle 
of their own experience. 

Much, of course, depends here upon the sense in 
which the word "experience" is used. The assumption 
need not necessarily be challenged except where, as is 
very often the case, an arbitrarily limited definition of 
experience is intended. From this general assumption 
flows the subjective theory of morals; from it is derived 
the conviction that the rationalistic values in religion are 
the only real, or at least demonstrable, ones; and hence 
from this comes the shifting of the seat of religious - 
authority from "revelation" to experience. In so far as 
this is a correction of emphasis only, or the abandon- 
ment of a misleading term rather than the denial of one 
of the areas and modes of understanding, again we have 
no quarrel with it. But if it means an exclusion of the 
supersenuous sources of knowledge or the denial of 
the existence of absolute values as the source of our 
relative and subjective understanding, then it strikes at 
the heart of religion. Because the religious life is built 
on those factors of experience that lie above the strictly * 
rational realm of consciousness just as the pagan view 
rests on primitive instincts that lie beneath it. Of course, 
in asserting the importance of these "supersensuous" 
values the religionist does not mean that they are be- 
yond the reach of human appraisal or unrelated by their 
nature to the rest of our understanding. By the intuitive 
he does not mean the uncritical nor by the supersensu- 
ous the supernatural in the old and discredited sense of 
an arbitrary and miraculous revelation. Mysticism is 
not superstition, nor are the insights of the poet the 
whimsies of the mere impressionist. But he insists that the 

4i 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

humanist, in his ordinary definition of experience, ig- 
nores or denies these superrational values. In opposition 
to him he rests his faith on that definition of experience 
which underlies Aristotle's statement that "the intellect 
is dependent upon intuition for knowledge both of what 
is below and what is above itself." 

Now it is this first set of factors which are the more 
important. For the cause, as distinguished from the oc- 
casions, of our present religious scale of values is, like 
all major causes, not practical but ideal, and its roots 
are found far beneath the soil of the present in the be- 
ginnings of the modern age in the fourteenth century. 
It was then that our world was born ; it is of the essence 
of that world that it arose out of indifference toward 
speculative thinking and unfaith in those concepts re- 
garding the origin and destiny of mankind which spec- 
ulative philosophy tried to express and prove. 

From the first, then, humanistic leaders have not only 
frankly rejected the scholastic theologies, which had 
been the traditional expression of those absolute values 
with which the religious experience is chiefly concerned, 
but also ignored or rejected the existence of those values 
themselves. Thus Petrarch is generally considered the 
first of modern humanists. He not only speaks of Rome 
— meaning the whole semi-political, semi-ecclesiastical 
structure 'of dogmatic supernaturalism — as that "pro- 
fane Babylon" but also reveals his rejection of the dis- 
tinctively religious experience itself by characterizing as 
"an impudent wench" the Christian church. The attack 
is partly therefore on the faith in transcendent values 
which fixes man's relative position by projecting him 
upon the screen of an infinite existence and which asserts 
that he has an absolute, that is, an other-than-human 

42 



CHILDREN OF ZION AND SONS OF GREECE 

guide. Again Erasmus, in his Praise of Folly, denounces 
indiscriminately churches, priesthoods, dogmas, ethi- 
cal values, the whole structure of organized religion, 
calling it those "foul smelling weeds of theology. " It 
was inevitable that such men as Erasmus and Thomas 
More should hold aloof from the Reformation, not, as 
has been sometimes asserted, from any lack of moral 
courage but because of intellectual conviction. They saw 
little to choose between Lutheran, Calvinistic and Romish 
dogmatism. They had rejected not only mediaeval eccle- 
siasticism but also that view of the world founded on 
supersensuous values, whose persistent intimations had 
produced the speculative and scholastic theologies. To 
them, in a quite literal sense, the proper study of man- 
kind was man. 

It is hardly necessary to speak here of the attitude 
towards the old "supernatural" religion taken by the 
English Deists of the last half of the seventeenth and 
first half of the eighteenth century. Here was the 
first definite struggle of the English church with a 
group of thinkers who, under the leadership of Shaftes- 
bury, Bolingbroke and others, attempted to adapt hu- 
manistic philosophy to theological speculation, to estab- 
lish the sufficiency of natural religion as opposed to 
revelation, and to deny the unique significance of the Old 
and New Testament Scriptures. The English Deists were 
not deep or comprehensive thinkers, but they were typ- 
ically humanistic in that their interests were not mainly 
theological or religious but rather those of a general cul- 
ture. They were inconsistent with their humanism in 
their doctrine of a personal God who was not only re- 
mote but separated from his universe, a deus ex machina 
who excluded the idea of immanence. While less influ- 

43 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

ential in England, they had a powerful effect upon 
French and German thinking. Both Voltaire and Rous- 
seau were rationalists and Deists to the end of their days 
and both were unwearied foes of any other-than-natural 
sources for our spiritual knowledge and religious values. 

In Germany the humanistic movement continued un- 
der Herder and his younger contemporaries, Schiller and 
Goethe. Its historical horizon, racial and literary sympa- 
thies, broadened under their direction, moving farther 
and farther beyond the sources and areas of accepted 
religious ideas and practices. They led the revival of 
study of the Aryan languages and cultures; especially 
those of the Hellenes and the inhabitants of the Indian 
peninsula. They originated that critical and rather hos- 
tile scrutiny of Semitic ideas and values in present civili- 
zation, which plays no small part in the dilettante nat- 
uralism of the moment. Thus the nature and place of 
man, under the influence of these "uninspired" literatures 
and cultures, became more and more important as both 
his person and his position in the cosmos ceased to be 
interpreted either in those terms of the moral transcend- 
ence of deity, or of the helplessness and insignificance 
of his creatures, which inform both the Jewish-Chris- 
tian Scriptures and the philosophic absolutism of the 
Catholic theologies. 

But the humanism of the eighteenth century comes 
most closely to grips with the classic statements and 
concepts of religion in the critical philosophy of Kant. 
It is the intellectual current which rises in him which is 
finding its last multifarious and minute rivulets in the 
various doctrines of relativity, in pragmatism, the sub- 
jectivism of the neo-realists, and in the superior place 
generally ascribed by present thinking to value judg- 

44 



CHILDREN OF ZION AND SONS OF GREECE 

ments as against existential ones. His central insist- 
ence is upon the impossibility of any knowledge of 
God as an objective reality. Speculative reason does in- 
deed give us the idea of God but he denies that we have 
in the idea itself any ground for thinking that there is 
an objective reality corresponding to it. The idea he ad- 
mits as necessitated by "the very nature of reason" but 
it serves a purely harmonizing office. It is here to give 
coherence and unity to the objects of the understanding, 
"to finish and crown the whole of human knowledge." 1 
Experience of transcendence thus becomes impossible. 
As Professor McGiffert in The Modern Ideas of God 
says : "Subjectively considered, religion is the recogni- 
tion of our duties as commands of God. When we do 
our duty we are virtuous ; when we recognize it as com- 
manded by God we are religious. The notion that there 
is anything we can do to please God except to live 
rightly is superstition. Moreover, to think that we can 
distinguish works of grace from works of nature, which 
is the essence of historic Christianity, or that we can de- 
tect the activity of heavenly influences is also supersti- 
tion. All such supernaturalism lies beyond our ken. There 
are three common forms of superstition, all promoted 
by positive religion : the belief in miracles, the belief in 
mysteries, and the belief in the means of grace." 2 So 
prayer is a confession of weakness, not a source of 
strength. 

Kant is more than once profoundly inconsistent with 
the extreme subjectivism of his theory of ideas as when 
he says in the Practical Reason: "Two things fill the 
mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe 

1 See The Critique of Pure Reason (Miiller, tr.), pp. 575 ff. 

2 Harvard Theo. Rev., vol. I, no. 1, p. 16. 

45 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

the oftener and the more steadily we reflect on them: 
the starry heavens above and the moral law within." 1 
Again he remarks, "The belief in a great and wise 
Author of the world has been supported entirely by the 
wonderful beauty, order and providence, everywhere 
displayed in nature." 2 Here the objective reality both of 
what is presented to our senses and what is conceived of 
in the mind, is, as though unconsciously, taken for 
granted. Thus while he contends for a practical theism, 
the very basis of his interest still rests in the conviction 
of a Being external to us and existing independent of our 
thought. 

But his intention of making right conduct the essence 
of religion is typical of the limits of humanistic interests 
and perceptions. In making his division of reason into 
the theoretical and the practical, it is to the latter realm 
that he assigns morality and religion. Clearly this is gen- 
uine rationalism. I am not forgetting Kant's great reli- 
gious contribution. He was the son of devout German 
pietists and saturated in the literature of the Old Testa- 
ment. It is to Amos, who may justly be called his spirit- 
ual father, that he owes the moral absoluteness of his 
categorical imperative, the reading of history as a moral 
order. He was following Amos when he took God out 
of the physical and put Him into the moral sphere and 
interpreted Him in the terms of purpose. But the doc- 
trine of The Critique of Practical Reason is intended to 
negate those transcendent elements generally believed to 
be the distinctive portions of religion. God is not known 
to us as an objective being, an entity without ourselves. 
He is an idea, a belief, which gives meaning to our ethi- 

1 The Critique of Practical Reason (tr. T. K. Abbott), p. 260. 

2 The Critique of Pure Reason, p. 702. 

46 



CHILDREN OF ZION AND SONS OF GREECE 

cal life, a subjective necessity. He is a postulate of the 
moral will. To quote Professor McGiffert again : "We 
do not get God from the universe, we give Him to the 
universe. We read significance and moral purpose into it. 
We assume God, not to account for the world, but for 
the subjective need of realizing our highest good. . . . 
Religion becomes a creative act of the moral will just 
as knowledge is a creative act of the understanding." 1 
Thus there are no ultimate values ; at least we can know 
nothing of them ; we have nothing to look to which is 
objective and changeless. The absolutism of the Cate- 
gorical Imperative is a subjective one, bounded by our- 
selves, formed of our substance. Religion is not dis- 
covered, but self-created, a sort of sublime expediency. 
It can carry, then, no confident assertion as to the mean- 
ing and destiny of the universe as a whole. 

Here, then, the nature of. morality, the inspiration 
for character, the solution of human destiny, are not 
sought outside in some sort of cosmic relationship, but 
within, either in the experience of the superman, the 
genius or the hero, or, as later, in the collective experi- 
ence and consciousness of the group. Thus this, too, 
throws man back upon himself, makes a new exaltation 
of personality in sharpest contrast to the scholastic doc- 
trine of the futility and depravity of human nature. It 
produces the assertion of the sacred character of the in- 
dividual human being. The conviction of the immeasura- 
ble worth of man is, of course, a characteristic teaching 
of Jesus ; what it is important for the preacher to re- 
member in humanism is the source, not the fact, of its 
estimate. With Jesus man's is a derived greatness found 
in him as the child of the Eternal ; in humanism, it is, 

i H. T. R., vol. I, no. 1, p. 18. 
47 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

so to speak, self-originated, born of present worth, not 
of sublime origin or shining destiny. 

So man in the humanistic movement moves into the 
center of his own world, becomes himself the measuring 
rod about whom all other values are grouped. In the 
place of inspiration, or prophetic understanding, which 
carries the implications of a transcendent source of truth 
and goodness, we have a sharply limited, subjective wis- 
dom and insight. The "thus saith the Lord" of the He- 
brew prophet means nothing here. The humanist is, of 
course, confronted with the eternal question of origins, 
of the thing-in-itself , the question whose insistence makes 
the continuing worth of the absolutist speculations. He 
begs the question by answering it with an assertion, not 
an explanation. He meets it by an exaltation of human 
genius. Genius explains all sublime achievements and 
genius is, so to speak, its own fons et origo. Thus Did- 
erot says : "Genius is the higher activity of the soul." 
"Genius," remarks Rousseau in a letter, "makes knowl- 
edge unnecessary." And Kant defines genius as "the talent 
to discover that which cannot be taught or learned." 1 
This appears to be more of an evasion than a definition! 
But the intent here is to refer all that seems to transcend 
mundane categories, man's highest, his widest, his 
sublimest intuitions and achievements, back to himself ; 
he is his own source of light and power. 

Such an anthropocentric view of life and destiny in 
exalting man, of course, thereby liberated him, not 
merely from ecclesiastical domination, but also from 
those illusive fears and questionings, those remote and 
imaginative estimates of his own intended worth and 
those consequent exacting demands upon himself which 

1 Anthropologic, para. 87 c. 

4 8 



CHILDREN OF ZION AND SONS OF GREECE 

are a part of the religious interpretation of life. Human- 
istic writing is full of the exulting sense of this emanci- 
pation. These superconsiderations do not belong in the 
world of experience as the humanist ordinarily con- 
ceives of it. Hence, man lives in an immensely con- 
tracted, but a very real and tangible world and within 
the small experimental circumference of it, he holds a 
far larger place (from one viewpoint, a far smaller one 
from another) than that of a finite creature caught in 
the snare of this world and yet a child of the Eternal, 
having infinite destinies. The humanist sees man as freed 
from the tyranny of this supernatural revelation and 
laws. He rejoices over man because now he stands, 

"self-poised on manhood's solid earth 
Not forced to frame excuses for his birth, 
Fed from within with all the strength he needs." 

It is this sense of independence which arouses in Goethe 
a perennial enthusiasm. It is the greatest bliss, he says, 
that the humanist won back for us. Henceforth, we must 
strive with all our power to keep it. 

We have attempted this brief sketch of one of the 
chief sources of the contemporary thought movement, 
that we may realize the pit whence we were digged, the 
quarry from which many corner stones in the present 
edifice of civilization were dug. The preacher tends to 
underestimate the comprehensive character of the per- 
vasive ideas, worked into many institutions and practices, 
which are continually impinging upon him and his mes- 
sage. They form a perpetual attrition, working silently 
and ceaselessly day and night, wearing away the distinc- 
tively religious conceptions of the community. Much of 

49 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

the vagueness and sentimentalism of present preaching, 
its uncritical impressionism, is due to the influence of 
the non-religious or, at least, the insufficiently religious 
character of the ruling ideas and motives outside the 
church which are impinging upon it, and upon the rest 
of the thinking of the moment. 

Now, this abstract humanism of the seventeenth and 
eighteenth centuries had a considerable influence upon 
early American preaching. The latter part of the eight- 
eenth century marked a breaking away from the Protes- 
tant scholasticism of the Reformation theology. The 
French Revolution accented and made operative, even 
across the Atlantic, the typical humanistic concepts of 
the rights of man and the sovereignty of the individual 
person. Skepticism and even atheism became a fashion 
in our infant republic. It was a mark of sophistication 
with many educated men to regard Christianity as not 
worthy of serious consideration. College students mod- 
estly admitted that they were infidels and with a delicious 
naivete assumed the names of Voltaire, Thomas Paine 
and even of that notorious and notable egotist Rousseau. 
It is said that in 1795, on the first Sunday of President 
Dwight's administration in Yale College, only three un- 
dergraduates remained after service to take the sacra- 
ment. The reasons were partly political, probably, but 
these themselves were grounded in the new philosophi- 
cal, anti-religious attitude. 

Of course, this affected the churches. There was a re- 
action from Protestant scholasticism within them which, 
later on, culminated in Unitarianism, Universalism and 
Arminianism. The most significant thing in the Unitarian 
movement was not its rejection of the Trinitarian specu- 
lation, but its positive contribution to the reassertion of 

50 



CHILDREN OF ZION AND SONS OF GREECE 

Jesus' doctrine of the worth and dignity of human nature. 
But it recovered that doctrine much more by the way of 
humanistic philosophy than by way of the teaching of the 
New Testament. I suppose the thing which has made the 
weakness of the Unitarian movement, its acknowledged 
lack of religious warmth and feeling, is due not to the 
place where it stands, but to the road by which it got 
there. 

Yet, take it for all in all, the effect upon the preach- 
ing of the supernatural and speculative doctrines and in- 
sights of Christianity, was not in America as great as 
might be expected. Kant died in 1804, and Goethe in 
1832, but only in the last sixty years has the preaching 
of the "evangelical" churches been fundamentally af- 
fected by the prevailing intellectual currents of the day. 
This is due, I think, to two causes. One was the nature 
of the German Reformation. It found preaching at a 
low ebb. Every great force, scholastic, popular, mystical, 
which had contributed to the splendor of the mediaeval 
pulpit had fallen into decay, and the widespread moral 
laxity of the clergy precluded spiritual insight. The Ref- 
ormation, with its ethical and political interests, revived 
preaching and by the nature of these same interests fixed 
the limits and determined the direction within which it 
should develop. It is important to remember that Luther 
did not break with the old theological system. He con- 
tinued his belief in an authority and revelation anterior, 
exterior and superior to man, merely shifting the locus 
of that authority from the Church to the Book. Thus 
he paved the way for Zwingli and the Protestant scholas- 
ticism which became more rigid and sterile than the 
Catholic which it succeeded. We usually regard the Ref- 
ormation as a part of the Renaissance and hence in- 

5i 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

eluded in the humanistic movement. Politically and reli- 
giously, it undoubtedly should be so regarded, for it was 
a chief factor in the renewal of German nationalism and 
its central doctrines of justification by faith, and the 
right of each separate believer to an unmediated ac- 
cess to the Highest, exalted the integrity and dignity of 
the individual. Inconsistently, however, it continued the 
old theological tradition. In the Lutheran system, says 
Paul de Lagarde, we see the Catholic scholastic struc- 
ture standing untouched with the exception of a few 
loci. And Harnack, in the Dogmengeschichte calls it "a 
miserable duplication of the Catholic Church." 

Now, New England preaching, it is true, found its 
chief roots in Calvinism; Calvin, rather than Luther, 
was the religious leader of the Reformation outside 
Germany. But his system, also, is only the continuation 
of the ancient philosophy of the Christian faith originat- 
ing with Augustine. He reduced it to order, expounded 
it with energy and consistency, but one has only to recall 
its major doctrines of the depravity of man, the atone- 
ment for sin, the irresistible grace of the Holy Spirit, to 
see how untouched it was by the characteristic postulates 
of the new humanism. And it was on his theology that 
New England preaching was founded. It was Calvin 
who, through Jonathan Edwards, the elder and the 
younger,, Joseph Bellamy, Samuel Hopkins, Nathaniel 
Emmons, Nathaniel N. Taylor, determined the course 
of the New England pulpit. 

The other reason for our relative immunity from hu- 
manistic influence is accidental and complementary 
merely. It is the mere fact of our physical isolation, 
which, until the last seventy-five years, quite largely shut 
off thinkers here from continental and English currents 

52 



CHILDREN OF ZION AND SONS OF GREECE 

of thought and contributed to the brilliant, if sterile, 
provincialism of the New England theology. 

It is, therefore, to the second set of media, which may 
be generally characterized as scientific and practical, that 
we now turn. These are the forces which apparently are 
most affecting Christian preaching at this moment. But 
it is important to remember that a large part of their in- 
fluence is to be traced to the philosophic and ethical ten- 
dencies of the earlier humanistic movement which had 
set the scene for them, to which they are so sympathetic 
that we may assert that it is in them that their practical 
interests are grounded and by them that their scientific 
methods are reinforced. I divide this second group of 
media, for clearness, under three heads. 

First comes the rise of the natural sciences. In 1859, 
Darwin published the Origin of Species and gave to the 
world the evolutionary hypothesis, foreshadowed by 
Goethe and other eighteenth-century thinkers, simulta- 
neously formulated by Wallace and himself. Here is a 
theory, open to objections certainly, not yet conclusively 
demonstrated, but the most probable one which we yet 
possess, as to the method of the appearance and the con- 
tinuance of life upon the planet. It conceives of creation 
as an unimaginably long and intricate development from 
the inorganic to the organic, from simple to complex 
forms of life. Like Kantianism and the humanistic 
movement generally, the evolutionary hypothesis springs 
from reasoned observation of man and nature, not from 
any a priori or speculative process. With this theory, long 
a regulative idea of our world, preaching was forced to 
come to some sort of an understanding. It strikes a 
powerful blow at the scholastic notion of a dichotomized 
universe divided between nature and supernature, divine 

53 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

and human. It reinforced humanism by minimizing, if 
not making unnecessary, the objective and external 
source and external interpretations of religions. It pushes 
back the initial creative act until it is lost in the mists 
and chaos of an unimaginably remote past. Meanwhile, 
creative energy, the very essence of transcendent life, is, 
as we know it, not transcendent at all, but working out- 
ward from within, a part of the process, not above and 
beyond it. The inevitable implication here is that God is 
sufficiently, if not exclusively, known through natural 
and human media. Science recognizes Him in the terms 
of its own categories as in and of His world, a part of 
all its ongoings and developments. But His creative life is 
indistinguishable from, if not identical with, its expres- 
sions. Here, then, is a practical obliteration of the line 
once so sharply drawn between the natural and the super- 
natural. Hence the demarcation between the divine and 
human into mutually exclusive states has disappeared. 

This would seem, then, to wipe out also any knowledge 
of absolute values. Christian theism has interpreted God 
largely in static, final terms. The craving for the absolute 
in the human mind, as witnessed by the long course of 
the history of thought, as pathetically witnessed to in the 
mixture of chicanery, fanaticism and insight of the 
modern mystical and occult healing sects, is central and 
immeasurable. But God, found, if at all, in the terms 
of a present process, is not static and absolute, but dy- 
namic and relative ; indefinite, incomplete, not final. And 
man's immense difference from Him, that sense of the 
immeasurable space between creator and created, is 
strangely contracted. The gulf between holiness and 
guiltiness tends also to disappear. For our life would ap- 
pear to be plastic and indefinite, a process rather than a 

54 



CHILDREN OF ZION AND SONS OF GREECE 

state, not open then to conclusive moral estimates ; in- 
complete, not fallen ; life an orderly process, hence not 
perverse but defensible; without known breaks or in- 
fringements, hence relatively normal and sufficiently in- 
telligible. 

A second factor was the rise of the humane sciences. 
In the seventh and eighth decades of the last century 
men were absorbed in the discovery of the nature and 
extent of the material universe. But beginning about 
1890, interest swerved again toward man as its most re- 
vealing study and most significant inhabitant. Anthro- 
pology, ethnology, sociology, physical and functional psy- 
chology, came to the front. Especially the humane studies 
of political science and industrial economics were magni- 
fied because of the new and urgent problems born of an 
industrial civilization and a capitalistic state. The inven- 
tion and perfection of the industrial machine had by 
now thoroughly dislocated former social groupings, 
made its own ethical standards and human problems. In 
the early days of the labor movement William Morris 
wrote, "we have become slaves of the monster to which 
invention has given birth." In 1853, shortly after the in- 
troduction of the cotton gin into India, the Viceroy 
wrote: "The misery is scarcely paralleled in the history 
of trade." (A large statement that!) "The bones of the 
cotton workers whiten the plains of India." 

But the temporary suffering caused by the immediate 
crowding out of cottage industry and the abrupt increase 
in production was insignificant beside the deeper influ- 
ence, physical, moral, mental, of the machine in chang- 
ing the permanent habitat and the entire mode of living 
for millions of human beings. It removed them from 
those healthy rural surroundings which preserve the 

55 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

half -primitive, half -poetic insight into the nature of 
things which comes from relative isolation and close con- 
tact with the soil, to the nervous tension, the amoral con- 
ditions, the airless, lightless ugliness of the early factory 
settlements. Here living conditions were not merely 
beastly; they were often bestial. The economic helpless- 
ness of the factory hands reduced them to essential slav- 
ery. They must live where the factory was, and could 
work only in one factory, for they could not afford to 
move. Hence they must obey their industrial master in 
every particular, since the raw material, the plant, the 
tools, the very roof that covered them, were all his ! In 
this new human condition was a powerful reinforcement, 
from another angle of approach, of the humanistic im- 
pulse. Man's interest in himself, which had been some- 
times that of the dilettante, largely imaginative and even 
sentimental, was reinforced by man's new distress and 
became concrete and scientific. 

Thus man regarded himself and his own world with 
a new and urgent attention. The methods and secondary 
causes of his intellectual, emotional and volitional life 
began to be laid bare. The new situation revealed the im- 
mense part played in shaping the personality and the fate 
of the individual by inheritance and environment. The 
Freudian doctrine, which traces conduct and habit back 
to early or prenatal repressions, strengthens the interest 
in the physical and materialistic sources of character and 
conduct in human life. Behavioristic psychology, inter- 
preting human nature in terms of observation and action, 
rather than analysis and value judgments, does the same. 
It tends to put the same emphasis upon the external and 
sensationalistic aspects of human experience. 

That, then, which is a central force in religion, the 

56 



CHILDREN OF ZION AND SONS OF GREECE 

sense of the inscrutability of human nature, the feeling 
of awe before the natural processes, what Paul called 
the mystery of iniquity and the mystery of godliness, 
tends to disappear. Wonder and confident curiosity suc- 
ceed humility and awe. That which is of the essence of 
religion, the sense of helplessness coupled with the sense 
of responsibility, is stifled. Whatever else the humane 
sciences have done, they have deepened man's fasci- 
nated and narrowing absorption in himself and given him 
apparent reason to believe that by analyzing the iron 
chain of cause and effect which binds the process and 
admitting that it permits no deflection or variation, he is 
making the further questions as to the origin, meaning 
and destiny of that process either futile or superfluous. 
So that, in brief, the check to speculative thinking and 
the repudiation of central metaphysical concepts, which 
the earlier movement brought about, has been accentu- 
ated and sealed by the humane sciences and the new 
and living problems offered them for practical solution. 
Thus the generation now ending has been carried beyond 
the point of combating ancient doctrines of God and 
man, to the place where it has become comparatively in- 
different, rather than hostile, to any doctrine of God, so 
absorbed is it in the physical functions, the temporal 
needs and the material manifestations of human per- 
sonality. 

Finally, as the natural and humane sciences mark new 
steps in the expanding humanistic movement, so in these 
last days, critical scholarship, itself largely a product of 
the humanistic viewpoint, has added another factor to 
the group. The new methods of historical and literary 
criticism, of comparative investigation in religion and 
the other arts, have exerted a vast influence upon con- 

57 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

temporary religious thought. They have not merely com- 
pleted the breakdown of an arbitrary and fixed external 
authority and rendered finally invalid the notion of equal 
or verbal inspiration in sacred writings, but the present 
tendency, especially in comparative religion, is to seek 
the source of all so-called religious experience within the 
human consciousness; particularly to derive it all from 
group experience. Here, then, is a theory of religious 
origins which once more turns the spirit of man back 
upon itself. Robertson Smith, Jane Harrison, Durkheim, 
rejecting an earlier animistic theory, find the origin of 
religion not in contemplation of the natural world and 
in the intuitive perception of something more-than- world 
which lies behind it, but in the group experience whose 
heightened emotional intensity and nervous energy im- 
parts to the one the exaltation of the many. Smith, in the 
Religion of the Semites, 1 emphasizes, as the fundamental 
conception of ancient religion, "the solidarity of the gods 
and their worshipers as part of an organic society." 
Durkheim goes beyond this. There are not at the be- 
ginning men and gods, but only the social group and the 
collective emotions and representations which are gener- 
ated through membership in the group. 

Here, then, is humanism again carried to the very 
heart of the citadel. Religion at its source contains no 
real perceptions of any extra-human force or person. 
What seemed to be such perceptions were only the felt 
participation of the individual in a collective conscious- 
ness which is superindividual, but not superhuman and 
always continuous with the individual consciousness. So 
that, whatever may or may not be true later, the begin- 
ning of man's metaphysical interests, his cosmic con- 

i P. 32. 

58 



CHILDREN OF ZION AND SONS OF GREECE 

sciousness, his more-than-human contacts, is simply his 
social experience, his collective emotions and representa- 
tions. Thus Durkheim : "We are able to say, in sum, that 
the religious individual does not deceive himself when 
he believes in the existence of a moral power upon which 
he depends and from which he holds the larger portion of 
himself. That power exists ; it is society. When the Aus- 
tralian feels within himself the surging of a life whose 
intensity surprises him, he is the dupe of no illusion; 
that exaltation is real, and it is really the product of 
forces that are external and superior to the individual." 1 
Yes, but identical in kind and genesis with himself and 
his own race. To Leuba, in his Psychological Study of 
Religion, this has already become the accepted view- 
point. Whatever is enduring and significant in religion is 
merely an expression of man's social consciousness and 
experience, his sense of participation in a common life. 
"Humanity, idealized and conceived as a manifestation 
of creative energy, possesses surprising qualifications for 
a source of religious inspiration." Professor Overstreet, 
in "The Democratic Conception of God," Hibbert Jour- 
nal, volume XI, page 409, says : "It is this large figure, 
not simply of human but of cosmic society which is to 
yield our God of the future. There is no place in the 
future for an eternally perfect being and no need — so- 
ciety, democratic from end to end, can brook no such 
radical class distinction as that between a supreme be- 
ing, favored with eternal and absolute perfection, and 
the mass of beings doomed to the lower ways of imper- 
fect struggle." 

There is certainly a striking immediacy in such lan- 
1 Les Formes elementaires de la vie religieuse, p. 322. 
59 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

guage. We leave for later treatment the question as to 
the historical validity of such an attitude. It certainly 
ignores some of the most distinguished and fruitful con- 
cepts of trained minds; it rules out of court what are 
to the majority of men real and precious factors in the 
religious experience. It would appear to be another in- 
stance, among the many, of the fallacy of identifying the 
part with the whole. But the effect of such pervasive 
thought currents, the more subtle and unfightable be- 
cause indirect and disguised in popular appearance and 
influence, upon the ethical and spiritual temper of reli- 
gious leaders, the very audacity of whose tasks puts them 
on the defensive, is vast and incalculable. At the worst, 
it drives man into a mechanicalized universe, with a re- 
sulting materialism of thought and life; at the best, it 
makes him a pragmatist with amiable but immediate ob- 
jectives, just practical "results" as his guide and goal. 
Morality as, in Antigone's noble phrase, "the unwritten 
law of heaven" sinks down and disappears. There is no 
room here for the Job who abhors himself and repents 
in dust and ashes nor for Plato's One behind the Many; 
no perceptible room, in such a world, for any of the ab- 
solute values, the transcendent interests, the ethics of 
idealism, any eschatology, or for Christian theodicy. That 
which has been the typical contribution of the religious 
perceptions in the past, namely, the comprehensive 
vision of life and the world and time sub specie aeterni- 
tatis is here abandoned. Eternity is unreal or empty; we 
never heard the music of the spheres. We are facing at 
this moment a disintegrating age. Here is a prime reason 
for it. The spiritual solidarity of mankind under the hu- 
manistic interpretation of life and destiny is dissolving 
and breaking down. Humanism is ingenious and reason- 
60 



CHILDREN OF ZION AND SONS OF GREECE 

able and clever but it is too limited; it doesn't answer 
enough questions. 

Before going on, in a future chapter, to discuss 
the question as to what kind of preaching such a world- 
view, seen from the Christian standpoint, needs, we are 
now to inquire what the effect of this humanistic move- 
ment upon Christian preaching has already been. That 
our preaching should have been profoundly influenced 
by it is inevitable. Religion is not apart from the rest of 
life. The very temperament of the speaker makes him 
peculiarly susceptible to the intellectual and spiritual 
movements about him. What, then, has humanism done 
to preaching? Has it worked to clarify and solidify the 
essence of the religious position? Or has preaching de- 
clined and become neutralized in religious quality under 
it? 

First : it has profoundly affected Christian preaching 
about God. The contemporary sermon on Deity mini- 
mizes or leaves out divine transcendence ; thus it starves 
one fundamental impulse in man — the need and desire to 
look up. Instead of this transcendence modern preaching 
emphasizes immanence, often to a naive and ludicrous 
degree. God is the being who is like us. Under the influ- 
ence of that monistic idealism, which is a derived philos- 
ophy of the humanistic impulse, preaching lays all the 
emphasis upon divine immanence in sharpest contrast 
either to the deistic transcendence of the eighteenth cen- 
tury or the separateness and aloofness of the God of the 
Hebrew Scriptures, or of the classic Greek theologies of 
Christianity. God is, of course ; that is, He is the inform- 
ing principle in the natural and human universe and es- 
sentially one with it. Present preaching does not confess 
this identification but it evades rather than meets the log- 
61 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

ical pantheistic conclusion. So our preaching has to do 
with God in the common round of daily tasks; with 
sweeping a room to His glory; with adoration of His 
presence in a sunset and worship of Him in a star. Every 
bush's aflame with Him ; there are sermons in stones and 
poems in running brooks. Before us, even as behind, God 
is and all is well. We are filled with a sort of intoxication 
with this intimate and protective company of the Infinite ; 
we are magnificently unabashed as we familiarly ap- 
proach Him. "Closer is He than breathing; nearer than 
hands or feet." Not then by denying or condemning or 
distrusting the world in which we live, not by asserting 
the differences between God and humanity do we under- 
stand Him. But by closest touch with nature do we find 
Him. By a superb paradox, not without value, yet equally 
ineffable in sentimentality and sublime in its impiety we 
say, beholding man, "that which is most human is most 
divine !" 

That there is truth in such comfortable and affable 
preaching is obvious ; that there is not much truth in it is 
obvious, too. To what extent, and in what ways, nature, 
red with tooth and claw, indifferent, ruthless, whimsical, 
can be called the expression of the Christian God, is not 
usually specifically stated. In what way man, just emerg- 
ing from the horror, the shame, the futility of his last 
and greatest debauch of bloody self-destruction, can be 
called the chief medium of truth, holiness and beauty, 
the matrix of divinity, is not entirely manifest. But the 
fatal defect of such preaching is not that there is not, of 
course, a real identity between the world and its Maker, 
the soul and its Creator, but that the aspect of reality 
which this truth expresses is the one which has least re- 
ligious value, is least distinctive in the spiritual experi- 
62 



CHILDREN OF ZION AND SONS OF GREECE 

ence. The religious nature is satisfied, and the springs of 
moral action are refreshed by dwelling on the "special- 
ness" of God ; men are brought back to themselves, not 
among their fellows and by identifying them with their 
fellows, but by lifting them to the secret place of the 
Most High. They need religiously not thousand-tongued 
nature, but to be kept secretly in His pavilion from the 
strife of tongues. It is the difference between God and 
men which makes men who know themselves trust Him. 
It is the "otherness," not the sameness, which makes Him 
desirable and potent in the daily round of life. A purely 
ethical interest in God ceases to be ethical and becomes 
complacent; when we rule out the supraphenomenal we 
have shut the door on the chief strength of the higher 
life. 

Second : modern preaching, under this same influence 
and to a yet greater degree, emphasizes the principle of 
identity, where we need that of difference, in its preach- 
ing about Jesus. He is still the most moving theme for 
the popular presentation of religion. But that is because 
He offers the most intelligible approach to that very 
"otherness" in the person of the godhead. His healing 
and reconciling influence over the heart of man — the way 
the human spirit expands and blossoms in His presence — 
is moving beyond expression to any observer, religious 
or irreligious. Each new crusade in the long strife for 
human betterment looks in sublime confidence to Him as 
its forerunner and defense. To what planes of common 
service, faith, magnanimous solicitude could He not lift 
the embittered, worldlyized men and women of this torn 
and distracted age, which is so desperately seeking its own 
life and thereby so inexorably losing it! But why is the 
heart subdued, the mind elevated, the will made tracta- 

63 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

ble by Him? Why, because He is enough like us so that 
we know that He understands, has utter comprehension ; 
and He is enough different from us so that we are will- 
ing to trust Him. In what lies the essence of the leader- 
ship of Jesus ? He is not like us : therefore, we are will- 
ing to relinquish ourselves into His hands. 

Now, that is only half the truth. But if I may use a 
paradox, it is the important half, the primary half. And 
it is just that essential element in the Christian experience 
of Jesus that modern preaching, under the humanistic 
impulse, is neglecting. Indeed, liberal preachers have 
largely ceased to sermonize about Him, just because it 
has become so easy ! Humanism has made Jesus obvious, 
hence, relatively impotent. With its unified cosmos, its 
immanent God, its exalted humanity, the whole Christo- 
logical problem has become trivial. It drops the cosmic 
approach to the person of Jesus in favor of the ethical. 
It does not approach Him from the side of God; we ap- 
proach nothing from that side now ; but from the side of 
man. Thus He is not so much a divine revelation as He 
is a human achievement. Humanity and divinity are one 
in essence. The Creator is distinguished from His crea- 
tures in multifarious differences of degree but not in kind. 
We do not see, then, in Christ, a perfect isolated God, 
joined to a perfect isolated man, in what were indeed 
the incredible terms of the older and superseded Christol- 
ogies. But rather, He is the perfect revelation of the moral 
being, the character of God, in all those ways capable 
of expression or comprehension in human life, just be- 
cause he is the highest manifestation of a humanity 
through which God has been forever expressing Himself 
in the world. For man is, so to speak, his own cosmic 
center ; the greatest divine manifestation which we know. 
64 



CHILDREN OF ZION AND SONS OF GREECE 

Granted, then, an ideal man, a complete moral being, and 
ipso facto we have our supreme revelation of God. 

So runs the thrice familiar argument. Of course, we 
have gained something by it. We may drop gladly the 
old dualistic philosophy, and we must drop it, though I 
doubt if it is so easy to drop the dualistic experience 
which created it. But I beg to point out that, on the 
whole, we have lost more religiously than we have gained. 
For we have made Jesus easy to understand, not as He 
brings us up to His level, but as we have reduced Him to 
ours. Can we afford to do that? Bernard's mystical line, 
"The love of Jesus, what it is, none but His loved ones 
know," has small meaning here. The argument is very good 
humanism but it drops the word "Saviour" out of the vo- 
cabulary of faith. Oh, how many sermons since, let us 
say, 1890, have been preached on the text, "He that hath 
seen me, hath seen the Father." And how uniformly the 
sermons have explained that the text means not that Je- 
sus is like God, but that God is like Jesus — and we have 
already seen that Jesus is like us ! One only has to state 
it all to see beneath its superficial reasonableness its ap- 
palling profanity ! 

Third : we may see the influence of humanism upon our 
preaching in the relinquishment of the goal of conver- 
sion. We are preaching to educate, not to save; to in- 
struct, not to transform. Conversion may be gradual and 
half-unconscious, a long and normal process under favor- 
able inheritance and with the culture of a Christian en- 
vironment. Or it may be sudden and catastrophic, a vio- 
lent change of emotional and volitional activity. When a 
man whose feeling has been repressed by sin and crusted 
over by deception, whose inner restlessness has been ac- 
cumulating under the misery and impotence of a divided 

65 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

life, is brought into contact with Christian truth, he can 
only accept it through a volitional crisis, with its cleans- 
ing flood of penitence and confession and its blessed re- 
ward of the sense of pardon and peace and the relinquish- 
ment of the self into the divine hands. But one thing is 
true of either process in the Christian doctrine of con- 
version. It is not merely an achievement, although it is 
that; it is also a rescue. It cannot come about without 
faith, the "will to believe" ; neither can it come about by 
that alone. Conversion is something we do; it is also 
something else, working within us, if we will let it, help- 
ing us to do ; hence it is something done for us. 

Now, this experience of conversion is passing out of 
Christian life and preaching under humanistic influence. 
We are accepting the Socratic dictum that knowledge is 
virtue. Hence we blur the distinction between the Chris- 
tian and the non-Christian. Education supplants salvation. 
We bring the boys and girls into the church because 
they are safer there than outside it ; and on the whole it 
is a good thing to do and really they belong there any- 
way. The church member is a man of the world, softened 
by Christian feeling. He is a kindly and amiable citizen 
and an honorable man; he has not been saved. But he 
knows the unwisdom of evil; if you know what is right 
you will do it. Intelligence needs no support from grace. 
It is strange that the church does not see that with this 
relinquishment of her insistence upon something that re- 
ligion can do for a man that nothing else can attempt, 
she has thereby given up her real excuse for being, 
and that her peculiar and distinctive mission has gone. 
It is strange that she does not see that the humanism 
which, since it is at home in the world, can sometimes 
make there a classic hero, degenerates dreadfully and be- 
66 



CHILDREN OF ZION AND SONS OF GREECE 

comes unreal in a church where unskilled hands use it to 
make it a substitute for a Christian saint ! But for how 
many efficient parish administrators, Y. M. C. A. secre- 
taries, up-to-date preachers, character is conceived of as 
coming not by discipline but by expansion, not by salva- 
tion, but by activity. Social service solves everything 
without any reference to the troublesome fact that the 
value of the service will depend upon the quality of the 
servant. Salvation is a combination of intelligence and 
machinery. Sin is pure ignorance or just maladjustment 
to environment. All we need is to know what is right and 
wrong; the humane sciences will take care of that; and, 
then, have an advertising agent, a gymnasium, a commit- 
tee on spiritual resources, a program, a conference, a 
drive for money, and behold, the Kingdom of God is 
among us ! 

Fourth, and most significant : it is to the humanistic 
impulse and its derived philosophies that we owe the in- 
dividualistic ethics, the relative absence of the sense of 
moral responsibility for the social order which has, from 
the beginning, maimed and distorted Protestant Chris- 
tianity. It was, perhaps, a consequence of the speculative 
and absolute philosophies of the mediaeval church that, 
since they endeavored to relate religion to the whole of 
the cosmos, its remotest and ultimate issues, so they con- 
ceived of its absoluteness as concerned with the whole 
of human experience, with every relation of organized 
society. Under their regulative ideas all human beings, 
not a selected number, had, not in themselves but be- 
cause of the Divine Sacrifice, divine significance ; rever- 
ence was had, not for supermen or captains of industry, 
but for every one of those for whom Christ died. There 
were no human institutions which were ends in them- 

6 7 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

selves or more important than the men which created and 
served them. The Holy Catholic Church was the only in- 
stitution which was so conceived ; all others, social, polit- 
ical, economic, were means toward the end of the preser- 
vation and expression of human personality. Hence, the 
interest of the mediaeval church in social ethics and cor- 
porate values ; hence, the axiom of the church's control 
of, the believers' responsibility for, the economic rela- 
tions of society. An unjust distribution of goods, the with- 
holding from the producer of his fair share of the wealth 
which he creates, profiteering, predatory riches — these 
were ranked under one term as avarice, and they were 
counted not among the venial offenses, like aberrations 
of the flesh, but avarice was considered one of the seven 
deadly sins of the spirit. The application of the ethics of 
Jesus to social control began to die out as humanism in- 
dividualized Christian morals and as, under its influence, 
nationalism tended to supplant the international ecclesi- 
astical order. The cynical and sordid maxim that business 
is business; that, in the economic sphere, the standards 
of the church are not operative and the responsibility of 
the church is not recognized — notions which are a chief 
heresy and an outstanding disgrace of nineteenth-century 
religion, from which we are only now painfully and 
slowly reacting — these may be traced back to the influ- 
ence of humanism upon Christian thought and conduct. 
In general, then, it seems to me abundantly clear that 
the humanistic movement has both limited and secu- 
larized Christian preaching. It dogmatically ignores 
supersensuous values; hence it has rationalized preach- 
ing ; hence it has made provincial its intellectual approach 
and treatment, narrowed and made mechanical its con- 
tent. It has turned preaching away from speculative to 
68 



CHILDREN OF ZION AND SONS OF GREECE 

practical themes. It was, perhaps, this mental and spirit- 
ual decline of the ministry to which a distinguished edu- 
cator referred when he told a body of Congregational 
preachers that their sermons were marked by "intellec- 
tual frugality." It is this which a great New England 
theologian-preacher, Dr. Gordon, means when he says 
"an indescribable pettiness, a mean kind of retail trade 
has taken possession of the preachers; they have substi- 
tuted the mill-round for the sun-path." 

The whole world today tends toward a monstrous ego- 
tism. Man's attention is centered on himself, his temporal 
salvation, his external prosperity. Preaching, yielding 
partly to the intellectual and partly to the practical en- 
vironment, has tended to adopt the same secular scale 
of values, somewhat pietized and intensified, and to move 
within the same area of operation. That is why most 
preaching today deals with relations of men with 
men, not of men with God. Yet human relationships can 
only be determined in the light of ultimate ones. Most 
preaching instinctively avoids the definitely religious 
themes ; deals with the ethical aspects of devotion ; with 
conduct rather than with worship; with the effects, not 
the causes, the expression, not the essence of the religious 
life. Most college preaching chiefly amounts to informal 
talks on conduct ; somewhat idealized discussions of pub- 
lic questions ; exhortations to social service. When ser- 
mons do deal with ultimate sanctions they can hardly be 
called Christian. They are often stoical ; self-control is 
exalted as an heroic achievement, as being self-authenti- 
cating, carrying its own reward. Or they are utilitarian, 
giving a sentimentalized or frankly shrewd doctrine of 
expediencies, the appeal to an exaggerated self-respect, 
enlightened self-interest, social responsibility. These are 

6 9 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

typical humanistic values ; they are real and potent and 
legitimate. But they are not religious and they do not 
touch religious motives. The very difference between the 
humanist and the Christian lies here. To obey a principle 
is moral and admirable ; to do good and be good because 
it pays is sensible; but to act from love of a person is a 
joyous ecstasy, a liberation of power; it alone transforms 
life with an ultimate and enduring goodness. Genuine 
Christian preaching makes its final appeal, not to fear, 
not to hope, not to future rewards and punishments, not 
to reason or prudence or benevolence. It makes its appeal 
to love, and that means that it calls men to devotion to 
a living Being, a Transcendence beyond and without 
us. For you cannot love a principle, or relinquish your- 
self to an idea. You must love another living Being. 
Which amounts to saying that humanism just because 
it is self-contained is self-condemned. It minimizes or 
ignores the living God, in His world, but not to be iden- 
tified with it ; beyond it and above it ; loving it because it 
needs to be loved; blessing it because saving it. In so 
doing, it lays the axe at the very root of the tree of reli- 
gion. Francis Xavier, in his greatest of all hymns, has 
stated once for all the essence of the Christian motive 
and the religious attitude: 

" O Deus, ego amo te 
Nee amo te ut salves me 
Aut quia non amantes te 
Aeternis punis igne. 

" Nee praemii illius spe 
Sed sicut tu amasti me 
Sic amo et amabo te 
Solem, quia Rex meus est." 
70 



CHILDREN OF ZION AND SONS OF GREECE 

What, then, has been the final effect of humanism 
upon preaching? It has tempted the preacher to deper- 
sonalize religion. And since love is the essence of per- 
sonality, it has thereby stripped preaching of the emo- 
tional energy, of the universal human interests and the 
prophetic insight which only love can bestow. Over 
against this depersonalization, we must find some way 
to return to expressing the religious view and utilizing 
the religious power of the human spirit. 



7i 



CHAPTER THREE 
Eating, Drinking and Being Merry 

WE ventured to say in the preceding chapter 
that, under the influences of more than three 
centuries of humanism, the spiritual solidar- 
ity of mankind is breaking down. For humanism makes 
an inhuman demand upon the will ; it minimizes the force 
of the subrational and it largely ignores the super- 
rational elements in human experience; it does not 
answer enough questions. Indeed, it is frankly con- 
fessed, particularly by students of the political and eco- 
nomic forces now working in society, that the new free- 
dom born in the Renaissance is, in some grave sense, a 
failure. It destroyed what had been the common moral 
authority of European civilization in its denial of the 
rule of the church. But for nearly four centuries it has 
become increasingly clear that it offered no adequate 
substitute for the supernatural moral and religious order 
which it supplanted. John Morley was certainly one of 
the most enlightened and humane positivists of the last 
generation. In his Recollections, published three years 
ago, there is a final paragraph which runs as follows: 
"A painful interrogatory, I must confess, emerges. Has 
not your school held the civilized world, both old and 
new alike, in the hollow of their hand for two long gener- 
ations past ? Is it quite clear that their influence has been 
so much more potent than the gospel of the various 
72 



EATING, DRINKING AND BEING MERRY 

churches? Circumspice. Is not diplomacy, unkindly 
called by Voltaire the field of lies, as able as ever it was 
to dupe governments and governed by grand abstract 
catchwords veiling obscure and inexplicable purposes, 
and turning the whole world over with blood and tears, 
to a strange Witch's Sabbath?" 1 This is his conclusion 
of the whole matter. 

But while the reasons for the failure are not far to 
seek, it is worth while for the preacher to dwell on them 
for a moment. In strongly centered souls like a Morley 
or an Erasmus, humanism produces a stoical endurance 
and a sublime self-confidence. But it tends, in lesser 
spirits, to a restless arrogance. Hence, both those lower 
elements in human nature, the nature and extent of 
whose force it either cloaks or minimizes, and those im- 
ponderable and supersensuous values which it tends to 
ignore and which are not ordinarily included in its defini- 
tion of experience, return to vex and plague it. Indeed 
the worst foe of humanism has never been the religious 
view of the world upon whose stored-up moral reserves 
of uncompromising doctrine it has often half-consciously 
subsisted. Humanism has long profited from the admitted 
truth that the moral restraints of an age that possesses 
an authoritative and absolute belief survive for some 
time after the doctrine itself has been rejected. What 
has revealed the incompleteness of the humanistic posi- 
tion has been its constant tendency to decline into nat- 
uralism ; a tendency markedly accelerated today. Hence, 
we find ourselves in a disintegrating and distracted epoch. 
In 1912 Rudolph Eucken wrote: "The moral solidarity 
of mankind is dissolved. Sects and parties are increas- 
ing; common estimates and ideals keep slipping away 

1 Recollections: II, p. 366 ff. 

73 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

from us ; we understand one another less and less. Even 
voluntary associations, that form of unity peculiar to 
modern times, unite more in achievement than in disposi- 
tion, bring men together outwardly rather than inwardly. 
The danger is imminent that the end may be helium 
omnium contra omnes, a war of all against all." 1 

That disintegration is sufficiently advanced so that we 
can see the direction it is taking and the principle that 
inspires it. Humanism has at least the value of an ob- 
jective standard in the sense that it sets up criteria which 
are without the individual ; it substitutes a collective sub- 
jectivism, if we may use the term, for personal whim 
and impulse. Thus it proclaims a classic standard of 
moderation in all things, the golden mean of the Greeks, 
Confucius' and Gautama's law of measure. It proposes 
to bring the primitive and sensual element in man under 
critical control ; to accomplish this it relies chiefly upon 
its amiable exaggeration of the reasonableness of human 
nature. But the Socratic dictum that knowledge is virtue 
was the product of a personality distinguished, if we ac- 
cept the dialogues of Plato, by a perfect harmony of 
thought and feeling. Probably it is not wise to build so 
important a rule upon so distinguished an exception! 

But the positive defect of humanism is more serious. 
It likewise proposes to rationalize those supersensuous 
needs and convictions which lie in the imaginative, the 
intuitive ranges of experience. The very proposal carries 
a denial of their value-in-themselves. Its inevitable result 
in the humanist is their virtual ignoring. The greatest of 
all the humanists of the Orient was Confucius. "I ven- 
ture to ask about death," said a disciple to the sage. 
"While you do not know life," replied he, "how can you 

1 Harvard Theo. Rev., vol. V, no. 3, p. 277. 
74 



EATING, DRINKING AND BEING MERRY 

know about death?" 1 Even more typical of the human- 
istic attitude towards the distinctively religious elements 
of experience are other sayings of Confucius, such as : 
"To give oneself earnestly to the duties due to men, and 
while respecting spiritual beings, to keep aloof from them 
may be called wisdom." 1 The precise area of humanistic 
interests is indicated in another observation. "The sub- 
jects on which the Master did not talk were . . . disorder 
and spiritual beings." 1 For the very elements of experi- 
ence which humanism belittles or avoids are found in the 
world where pagans like Rabelais robustly jest or the 
high spaces where souls like Newman meditate and pray. 
The humanist appears to be frightened by the one and re- 
pelled by the other; will not or cannot see life steadily 
and whole. That a powerful primitivistic faith, like Tao- 
ism, a sort of religious bohemianism, should flourish be- 
side such pragmatic and passionless moderation as classic 
Confucianism is inevitable ; that the worship of Amida 
Buddha, the Buddha of redemption and a future heaven, 
of a positive and eternal bliss, should be the Chinese 
form of the Indian faith is equally intelligible. After a 
like manner it is the humanism of our Protestant preach- 
ing today from which men are defecting into utter 
worldliness and indifference on the one hand and return- 
ing to mediaeval and Catholic forms of supernaturalism 
on the other. 

For the primitive in man is a beast whom it is hard 
to chain nor does humanism with its semi-scientific, semi- 
sentimental laudation of all natural values produce that 
exacting mood of inward scrutiny in which self-control 
has most chance of succeeding. Hence here, as elsewhere 
on the continent, and formerly in China, in Greece and 

i Analects, XI, CXI ; VI, CXX. 
75 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

in Rome, a sort of neo-paganism has been steadily sup- 
planting it. 

To the study of this neo-paganism we now address our- 
selves. It is the third and lowest of those levels of human 
experience to which we referred in the first lecture. The 
naturalist, you may remember, is that incorrigible indi- 
vidual who imagines that he is a law unto himself, that 
he may erect his person into a sovereign over the whole 
universe. He perversely identifies discipline with repres- 
sion and makes the unlimited the goal both of imagination 
and conduct. Oscar Wilde's epigrams, and more particu- 
larly his fables, are examples of a thoroughgoing natural- 
ist's insolent indifference to any form of restraint. All 
things, whether holy or bestial, were material for his 
topsy-turvy wit, his literally unbridled imagination. No 
humanistic law of decency, that is to say, a proper re- 
spect for the opinions of mankind, and no divine law of 
reverence and humility, acted for him as a restraining 
force or a selective principle. An immediate and signifi- 
cant example of this naturalistic riot of feeling, with its 
consequent false and anarchic scale of values, is found in 
the film dramas of the moving picture houses. Unreal ex- 
travagance of imagination, accompanied by the debauch 
of the aesthetic and moral judgment, frequently distin- 
guishes them. In screenland, it is the vampire, the villain, 
the superman, the saccharine angel child, who reign al- 
most undisputed. Noble convicts, virtuous courtesans, at- 
tractive murderers, good bad men, and ridiculous good 
men, flit across the canvas haloed with cheap sentimental- 
ity. Opposed to them, in an ever losing struggle, are those 
conventional figures who stand for the sober realities of 
\an orderly and disciplined world; the judge, the police- 
man, the mere husband. These pitiable and laughable fig- 
7 6 



EATING, DRINKING AND BEING MERRY 

ures are always outwitted ; they receive the fate which in- 
deed, in any primitive society, they so richly deserve ! 

How deeply sunk in the modern world are the roots of 
this naturalism is shown by its long course in history, 
paralleling humanism. It has seeped down through the 
Protestant centuries in two streams. One is a sort of / 
scientific naturalism. It exalts material phenomena and 
the external order, issues in a glorification of elemental 
impulses, an attempted return to childlike spontaneous 
living, the identifying of man's values with those of prim- 
itive nature. The other is an emotional naturalism, of •* 
which Maeterlinck is at the moment a brilliant and lam- 
entable example. This exchanges the world of sober 
conduct, intelligible and straightforward thinking for an 
unfettered dreamland, compounded of fairy beauty, 
flashes of mystical and intuitive understanding inter- 
mixed with claptrap magic, a high-flown commercialism 
and an etherealized sensuality. 

Rousseau represents both these streams in his own per- 
son. His sentimentalized egotism and bland sensuality 
pass belief. His sensitive spirit dissolves in tears over the 
death of his dog but he bravely consigns his illegitimate 
children to the foundling asylum without one tremor. In 
his justly famous and justly infamous Confessions, he 
presents himself Satan-wise before the Almighty at the 
last Judgment, these Confessions in his hand, a challenge 
to the remainder of the human race upon his lips. "Let 
a single one assert to Thee, if he dare : I am better than 
that man." But his preachment of natural and sponta- 
neous values, return to primitive conditions, was equally 
aggressive. If anyone wants to inspect the pit whence the 
Montessori system of education was digged, let him read 
Rousseau, who declared that the only habit a child 

77 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

should have is the habit of not having a habit, or his con- 
temporary disciple, George Moore, who says that one 
should be ashamed of nothing except of being ashamed. 
There are admirable features in the schooling-made-easy 
system. It recognizes the fitness of different minds for 
different work; that the process of education need not 
and should not be forbidding; that natural science has 
been subordinated overmuch to the humanities ; that the 
imagination and the hand should be trained with the in- 
tellect. But the method which proposes to give children 
an education along the lines of least resistance is, like 
all other naturalism, a contradiction in terms, sometimes 
a reductio ad absurdum, sometimes ad nauseam.- As long 
ago as 1893, when Huxley wrote his Romanes lecture on 
Evolution and Ethics, this identity of natural and human 
values was explicitly denied. Teachers do not exist for 
the amusement of children, nor for the repression of chil- 
dren; they exist for the discipline of children. The new 
education is consistently primitivistic in the latitude 
which it allows to whim and in its indulgence of indo- 
lence. There is only one way to make a man out of a 
child; to teach him that happiness is a by-product of 
achievement ; that pleasure is an accompaniment of labor ; 
that the foundation of self-respect is drudgery well done ; 
that there is no power in any system of philosophy, any 
view of the world, no view of the world, which can re- 
lease him from the unchanging necessity of personal 
struggle, personal consecration, personal holiness in hu- 
man life. "That wherein a man cannot be equaled," says 
Confucius, "is his work which other men cannot see." 1 
The humanist, at least, does not blink the fact that we 
are caught in a serious and difficult world. To rail at it, 
1 Doctrine of the Mean, ch. xxxiii, v. 2. 

78 



EATING, DRINKING AND BEING MERRY 

to deny it, to run hither and thither like scurrying rats to 
evade it, will not alter one jot or one tittle of its inexora- 
ble facts. 

Following Rousseau and Chateaubriand come a strik- 
ing group of Frenchmen who passed on this torch of eth- 
ical and aesthetic rebellion. Some of them are wildly ro- 
mantic like Dumas and Hugo ; some of them perversely 
realistic like Balzac, Flaubert, Gautier, Zola. Paul Ver- 
laine, a near contemporary of ours, is of this first num- 
ber ; writer of some of the most exquisite lyrics in the 
French language, yet a man who floated all his life in 
typical romantic fashion from passion to repentance, 
"passing from lust of the flesh to sorrow for sin in per- 
petual alternation." Guy de Maupassant again is a nat- 
uralist of the second sort, a brutal realist; de Maupassant, 
who died a suicide, crying out to his valet from his 
hacked throat "Encore Vhomme au rancart!" — another 
carcass to the dustheap ! 

In English letters Wordsworth in his earlier verse il- 
lustrated the same sentimental primitivism. It would be 
unfair to quote Peter Bell, for that is Wordsworth at his 
dreadful worst, but even in Tintern Abbey, which has 
passages of incomparable majesty and beauty, there are 
lines in which he declares himself: 

" . . . well pleased to recognize 
In nature, and the language of the sense 
The anchor of my purest thought, the nurse, 
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul 
Of all my moral being." 

Byron's innate sophistication saves him from the ludi- 
crous depths to which Wordsworth sometimes fell, but 
he, too, is Rousseau's disciple, a moral rebel, a highly 

79 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

personal and subjective poet of whom Goethe said that 
he respected no law, human or divine, except that of the 
three unities. Byron's verse is fascinating; it overflows 
with a sort of desperate and fiery sincerity ; but, as he 
himself says, his life was one long strife of "passion with 
eternal law." He combines both the romantic and the 
realistic elements of naturalism, both flames with ele- 
mental passion and parades his cynicism, is forever 
snapping his mood in Don Juan, alternating extravagant 
and romantic feeling with lines of sardonic and purposely 
prosaic realism. Shelley is a naturalist, too, not in the 
realm of sordid values but of Arcadian fancy. The pre- 
Raphaelites belong here, together with a group of young 
Englishmen who flourished between 1890 and 1914, of 
whom John Davidson and Richard Middleton, both sui- 
cides, are striking examples. Poor Middleton turned 
from naturalism to religion at the last. When he had re- 
solved on death, he wrote a message telling what he was 
about to do, parting from his friend with brave assump- 
tion of serenity. But he did not send the postcard, and 
in the last hour of that hired bedroom in Brussels, 
with the bottle of chloroform before him, he traced across 
the card's surface "a broken and a contrite spirit thou 
wilt not despise." So there was humility at the last. One 
remembers rather grimly what the clown says in Twelfth 
Night, 

"Pleasure will be paid some time or other." 

This same revolt against the decencies and conventions 
of our humanist civilization occupies a great part of pres- 
ent literature. How far removed from the clean and virile 
stoicism of George Meredith or the honest pessimism of 
Thomas Hardy is Arnold Bennett's The Pretty Lady or 
80 



EATING, DRINKING AND BEING MERRY 

Galsworthy's The Dark Flower. Finally, in this country 
we need only mention, if we may descend so far, such 
naturalists in literature as Jack London, Robert Cham- 
bers and Gouverneur Morris. One's only excuse for re- 
ferring to them is that they are vastly popular with the 
people whom you and I try to interest in sermons, to 
whom we talk on religion ! 

Of course, this naturalism in letters has its accom- 
panying and interdependent philosophic theory, its intel- 
lectual interpretation and defense. As Kant is the noblest 
of the moralists, so I suppose William James and, still 
later, Henri Bergson and Croce are the chief protagonists 
of unrestrained feeling and naturalistic values in the 
world of thought. To the neo-realists "the thing given" is 
alone reality. James' pragmatism frankly relinquishes any 
absolute standard in favor of relativity. In the Varieties of 
Religious Experience, which Professor Babbitt tells us 
someone in Cambridge suggested should have had for a 
subtitle "Wild Religions I Have Known," he is plainly 
more interested in the intensity than in the normality, in 
the excesses than in the essence of the religious life. In- 
deed, Professor Babbitt quotes him as saying in a letter 
to Charles Eliot Norton, "mere sanity is the most Philis- 
tine and at the bottom most unessential of a man's attri- 
butes." 1 In the same way Bergson, consistently anti- 
Socratic and discrediting analytical intellect, insists that 
whatever unity may be had must come through instinct, 
not analysis. He refuses to recognize Plato's One in the 
Many, sees the whole universe as "a perpetual gushing 
forth of novelties," a universal and meaningless flux. 
Surrender to this eternal flux, he appears to say, and 
then we shall gain reality. So he relies on impulse, in- 
1 Letter to C. E. Norton, June 30, 1904. 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

stinct, his elan vital, which means, I take it, on man's 
subrational emotions. We call it Intuitionism, but such 
philosophy in plain and bitter English is the intellectual 
defense and solemn glorification of impulse. "Time," 
says Bergson, "is a continuous stream, a present that en- 
dures." 1 Time apparently is all. "Life can have no pur- 
pose in the human sense of the word." 2 Essentially, then, 
James, Bergson and Croce appeal from intellect to feel- 
ing. They return to primitivism. 

Here is a philosophy which obviously may be both as 
antihumanistic and as irreligious as any which could well 
be conceived. Here is license in conduct and romanticism 
in expression going hand in hand with this all but exclu- 
sive emphasis upon relativity in thought. Here is disor- 
der, erected as a universal concept ; the world conceived 
of as a vast and impenetrable veil which is hiding noth- 
ing; an intricacy without pattern. Obviously so ungov- 
erned and fluid a universe justifies uncritical and ir- 
responsible thinking and living. 

We have tried thus to sketch that declension into pa- 
ganism on the part of much of the present world, of 
which we spoke earlier in the chapter. It denies or ignores 
the humanistic law with its exacting moral and aesthetic 
standards; it openly flouts the attitude of obedience and 
humility before religious mandates, and, so far as op- 
portunity "offers or prudence permits, goes its own inso- 
lently wanton way. Our world is full of dilettanti in the 
colleges, anarchists in the state, atheists in the church, 
bohemians in art, sybarites in conduct and ineffably silly 
women in society, who have felt, and occasionally studied 
the scientific and naturalistic movement just far enough 

1 Le Perception de Changement, 30. 

2 devolution creatrice, 55. 

82 



EATING, DRINKING AND BEING MERRY 

and superficially enough to grasp the idea of relativity 
and to exalt it as sufficient and complete in itself. Many 
of them are incapable of realizing the implications for 
conduct and belief which it entails. Others of them, who 
are of the lesser sort, pulled by the imperious hungers of 
the flesh, the untutored instincts of a restless spirit, hat- 
ing Hellenic discipline no less than Christian renunciation, 
having no stomach either for self-control or self-surren- 
der, look out on the mass of endlessly opposing complex- 
ities of the modern world and gladly use that vision as 
an excuse for abandoning what is indeed the ever failing 
but also the ever necessary struggle to achieve order, 
unity, yes, even perfection. 

To them, therefore, the only way to conquer a tempta- 
tion is to yield to it. They rail nonsensically at all repres- 
sion, forgetting that man cannot express the full circle 
of his mutually exclusive instincts, and that when he 
gives rein to one he thereby negates another ; that choice, 
therefore, is inevitable and that the more exacting and 
critical the choice, the more valuable and comprehensive 
the expression. So they frankly assert their choices along 
the lines of least resistance and abandon themselves, at 
least in principle, to emotional chaos and moral senti- 
mentalism. Very often they are of all men the most metic- 
ulously mannered. But their manners are not the decorum 
of the humanist, they are the etiquette of the worldling. 
Chesterfield had these folk in mind when he spoke with 
an intolerable, if incisive, cynicism of those who know 
the art of combining the useful appearances of virtue 
with the solid satisfactions of vice. 

Such naturalism is sometimes tolerated by those who 
aspire to urbane and liberal judgments because they 
think it can be defended on humanistic grounds. But, as 

83 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

a matter of fact, it is as offensive to the thoroughgoing 
humanist as it is to the sincere religionist. They have a 
common quarrel with it. Take, for example, the notori- 
ous naturalistic doctrine of art for art's sake, the defiant 
divorcing of ethical and aesthetic values. Civilization no 
less than religion must fight this. For it is as false in ex- 
perience and as unclear in thinking as could well be im- 
agined. Its defense, so far as it has any, is based upon the 
confusion in the pagan mind of morality with moraliz- 
ing, a confusion that no good humanist would ever per- 
mit himself. Of course, the end of art is neither preach- 
ing nor teaching but delighting. For that very reason, 
however, art, too, must conform — hateful word! — con- 
form to fixed standards. For the sense of proportion, 
the instinct for elimination, is integral to art and this, as 
Professor Babbitt points out, is attained only with the 
aid of the ethical imagination. 1 Because without the ethi- 
cal restraint, the creative spirit roams among unbridled 
emotions; art becomes impressionism. What it then pro- 
duces may indeed be picturesque, melodramatic, sensual, 
but it will not be beautiful because there will be no im- 
aginative wholeness in it. In other words, the artist who 
divorces aesthetics from ethics does gain creative license, 
but he gains it at the expense of a balanced and harmo- 
nious expression. If you do not believe it, compare the 
Venus de Milo with the Venus de Medici or a Rubens 
fleshy, spilling-out-of-her-clothes Magdalen with a Dona- 
tello Madonna. When ethical restraint disappears, art 
tends to caricature, it becomes depersonalized. The Ve- 
nus de Milo is a living being, a great personage ; indeed, 
a genuine and gracious goddess. The Venus de Medici 
has scarcely any personality at all; she is chiefly objecti- 
1 Rousseau and Romanticism, p. 206. 
84 



EATING, DRINKING AND BEING MERRY 

fied desire ! The essence of art is not spontaneous expres- 
sion nor naked passion ; the essence of art is critical ex- 
pression, restrained passion. 

Now, such extreme naturalism has been the continu- 
ing peril and the arch foe of every successive civilization. 
It is the "reversion to type" of the scientist, the "natural 
depravity" of the older theology, the scoffing devil, with 
his eternal no ! in Goethe's Faust. It tends to accept 
all powerful impulses as thereby justified, all vital 
and novel interests as ipso facto beautiful and good. 
Nothing desirable is ugly or evil. It pays no attention, ex- 
cept to ridicule them, to the problems that vex high and 
serious souls: What is right and wrong? What is ugly 
and beautiful? What is holy and what is profane? It 
either refuses to admit the existence of these questions or 
else asserts that, as insoluble, they are also negligible 
problems. To all such stupid moralizing it prefers the 
click of the castanets ! The law, then, of this naturalism 
always and everywhere is the law of rebellion, of ruthless 
self-assertion, of whim and impulse, of cunning and of 
might. 

You may wonder why we, being preachers, have spent 
so much time talking about it. Folk of this sort do not 
ordinarily flock to the stenciled walls and carpeted floors 
of our comfortable, middle-class Protestant meeting- 
houses. They are not attracted by Tiffany glass windows, 
nor the vanilla-flavored music of a mixed quartet, nor the 
oddly assorted "enrichments" we have dovetailed into a 
once puritan order of worship. That is true, but it is also 
true that these are they who need the Gospel; also that 
these folk do influence the time-current that enfolds us 
and pervades the very air we breathe and that they and 
their standards are profoundly influencing the youth of 

85 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

this generation. You need only attend a few college 
dances to be sure of that ! One of the sad things about the 
Protestant preacher is his usual willingness to move in a 
strictly professional society and activity, his lack of ex- 
tra-ecclesiastical interests, hence his narrow and unskill- 
ful observations and perceptions outside his own parish 
and his own field. 

Moreover, there are other forms in which naturalism is 
dominating modern society. It began, like all movements, 
in literature and philosophy and individual bohemianism ; 
but it soon worked its way into social and political and 
economic organizations. Now, when we are dealing with 
them we are dealing with the world of the middle class ; 
this is our world. And here we find naturalism today in 
its most brutal and entrenched expressions. Here it con- 
fronts every preacher on the middle aisle of his Sunday 
morning congregation. We are continually forgetting this 
because it is a common fallacy of our hard-headed and 
prosperous parishioners to suppose that the vagaries of 
philosophers and the maunderings of poets have only the 
slightest practical significance. But few things could be 
further from the truth. It is abstract thought and pure 
feeling which are perpetually moulding the life of office 
and market and street. It has sometimes been the dire 
mistake of preaching that it took only an indifferent and 
contemptuous interest in such contemporary movements 
in literature and art. Its attitude toward them has been 
determined by temperamental indifference to their ap- 
peal. It forgets the significance of their intellectual 
and emotional sources. This is, then, provincialism 
and obtuseness and nowhere are they by their very nature 
more indefensible or more disastrous than in the preacher 
of religion. 

86 



EATING, DRINKING AND BEING MERRY 

Let us turn, then, to those organized expressions of so- 
ciety where our own civilization is strained the most, 
where it is nearest to the breaking point, namely, to our 
industrial and political order. Let us ask ourselves if we 
do not find this naturalistic philosophy regnant there. 
That we are surrounded by widespread industrial revolt, 
that we see obvious political decadence on the one hand, 
and a determination to experiment with fresh govern- 
mental processes on the other, few would deny. It would 
appear to me that in both cases the revolt and the deca- 
dence are due to that fierce, short creed of rebellion 
against humane no less than religious standards, which 
has more and more governed our national economic sys- 
tems and our international political intercourse. Let me 
begin with business and industry as they existed before 
the war. I paint a general picture; there are many and 
notable exceptions to it, human idealism there is in plenty, 
but it and they only prove the rule. And as I paint the pic- 
ture, ask yourselves the two questions which should in- 
terest us as preachers regarding it. First, by which of 
these three laws of human development, religious, hu- 
manistic, naturalistic, has it been largely governed? Sec- 
ondly, by what law are men now attempting to solve its 
present difficulties? 

The present industrial situation is the product of two 
causes. One of them was the invention of machinery and 
the discovery of steam transit. These multiplied produc- 
tion. They made accessible unexploited sources of raw 
material and new markets for finished goods. The op- 
portunities for lucrative trading and the profitableness of 
overproduction which they made possible became almost 
immeasurable. Before these discoveries western society 
was generally agricultural, accompanied by cottage in- 

87 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

dustries and guild trades. It was largely made up of di- 
rect contacts and controlled by local interests. After them 
it became a huge industrial empire of ramified interna- 
tional relationships. 

JThe second factor in the situation was the intellectual 
and spiritual nature of the society which these inventions 
entered. It was, as we have seen, essentially humanistic. 
It believed much in the natural rights of man. The indi- 
vidual was justified, by the natural order, in seeking his 
separate good. If he only sought it hard enough and well 
enough the result would be for the general welfare of so- 
ciety. Thus at the moment when mechanical invention 
offered unheard-of opportunities for material expansion 
and lucrative business, the thought and feeling of the 
community pretty generally sanctioned an individualistic 
philosophy of life. The result was tragic if inevitable. The 
new industrial order offered both the practical incentive 
and the theoretical justification for institutional declen- 
sion from humane to primitive standards. It is not to be 
supposed that men slipped deliberately into paganism; 
the human mind is not so sinister as it is stupid nor so 
cruel as it is unimaginative nor so brutal as it is compla- 
cent. For the most part we do not really understand, in our 
daily lives, what we are about. Hence society degenerated, 
as it always does, in the confident and stubborn belief that 
it was improving the time and doing God's service. But 
He that sitteth in the heavens must have laughed, He 
must have had us in derision! 

For upon what law, natural, human, divine, has this 
new empire been founded? That it has produced great 
humanists is gratefully conceded ; that real spiritual prog- 
ress has issued from its incidental cosmopolitanism is 
manifest ; but which way has it fronted, what have been 
88 



EATING, DRINKING AND BEING MERRY 

its characteristic emphases and its controlling tendencies? 
Let its own works testify. It has created a world of new 
and extreme inequality, both in the distribution of ma- 
terial, of intellectual and of spiritual goods. Here is a 
small group who own the land, the houses, the factories, 
machinery and the tools. Here is a very large group, with- 
out houses, without tools, without land or goods. At this 
moment only 7 per cent of our 110,000,000 of Ameri- 
can people have an income of $3,000 or more; only 
1% per cent have an income of $5,000 or more! What 
law produced and justifies such a society? The unwritten 
law of heaven? No. The law of humanism, of Confucius 
and Buddha and Epictetus and Aurelius? No. The law 
of naked individualism; of might; force; cunning? Yes. 

Here in our American cities are the overwealthy and 
the insolently worldly people. They have their palatial 
town house, their broad inland acres ; some of them have 
their seaside homes, their fish and game preserves as well. 
Here in our American cities are the alien, the ignorant, 
the helpless, crowded into unclean and indecent tene- 
ments, sometimes 1,000 human beings to the acre. What 
justifies a pseudo-civilization which permits such tragic 
inequality of fortune? Inequality of endowment? No. 
First, because there is no natural inequality so extreme 
as that ; secondly, because no one would dare assert that 
these cleavages in the industrial state even remotely par- 
allel the corresponding cleavages in the distribution of 
ability among mankind. What justifies it, then? The un- 
written law of heaven? No. The law of humanism? No. 
The law of the jungle? Yes. 

Now for our second question. By what law, admitting 
many exceptions, are men on the whole trying to change 
this situation at once indecent and impious ? This is a yet 

s 9 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

more important query. Our world has obviously awak- 
ened to the rottenness in Denmark. But where are we 
turning for our remedy? Is it to the penitence and con- 
fession, the public-mindedness, the identification of the 
fate of the individual with the fate of the whole group 
which is the religious impulse ? Is it to a disinterested and 
even-handed justice, the high legalism of the Golden 
Rule, which would be the humanist's way ? Or is it to the 
old law of aggression and might transferring the gain 
thereof from the present exploiters to the recently ex- 
ploited ? 

It would appear to be generally true that society at this 
moment is not chiefly concerned with either love or jus- 
tice, renunciation or discipline, not with the supplanting of 
the old order, but with perpetuating the naturalistic prin- 
ciple by means of a partial redivision of the spoils, a series 
of compromises, designed to make it more tolerable for 
one class of its former victims. Thus in capital we have 
the autocratic corporation, atoning for past outrages on 
humanity by a well-advertised benevolent paternalism, 
calculated to make men comfortable so that they may not 
struggle to be free, or by huge gifts to education, to phi- 
lanthropy, to religion. In labor we see men rising in brute 
fury against both employer and society. They deny the 
basic necessities of life to their fellow citizens ; they bring 
the bludgeon of the picket down upon the head of the 
scab ; by means of the closed shop they refuse the right to 
work to their brother craftsmen ; they level the incapable 
men up and the capable men down by insisting upon uni- 
formity of production and wage. Thus they replace the 
artificial inequality of the aristocrat with the artificial 
equality of the proletariat, striving to organize a new tyr- 
anny for the old. It is significant that our society believes 
90 



EATING, DRINKING AND BEING MERRY 

that this is the only way by which it can gain its rights. 
That betrays our real infidelity. For between the two, as- 
sociated capital and associated labor, what is there to 
choose today ? By what law, depending upon what sort of 
power, is each seeking its respective ends? By the un- 
written law of heaven? No. By the humane law, some ob- 
jective standard of common rights and inclusive justice? 
No ! By the ancient law that the only effectual appeal is to 
might and that opportunity therefore justifies the deed? 
On the whole it is to this question that we must answer, 
yes! 

Turn away now from national economics and industry 
to international politics. Does not its real politik make the 
philosophical naturalism of Spencer and Haeckel seem 
like child's play? For long there has been one code of 
ethics for the peaceful penetration of commercially desir- 
able lands, for punitive expeditions against peoples pos- 
sessed of raw materials, for international banking and fi- 
nance and diplomatic intercourse, and another code for 
private honor and personal morality. There has been one 
moral scale of values for the father of his family and 
another for the same man as ward or state or federal 
politician; one code to govern internal disputes within 
the nation; another code to govern external disputes be- 
tween nations. And what is this code that produced the 
Prussian autocracy, that long insisted on the opium trade 
between India and China, that permitted the atrocities in 
the Belgian Congo, that sent first Russia and then Japan 
into Port Arthur and first Germany and then Japan into 
Shantung, that insists upon retaining the Turk in Con- 
stantinopkj that produced the already discredited treaty 
of Versailles? What is the code that made the deadly 
rivalry of mounting armaments between army and army, 

9i 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

navy and navy, of the Europe before 1914? The code, to 
be sure, of cunning, of greed, of might; the materialism 
of the philosopher and the naturalism of the sensualist, 
clothed in grandiose forms and covered with the insuffer- 
able hypocrisy of solemn phrases. There are no conceiva- 
ble ethical or religious interests and no humane goals or 
values that justify these things. International diplomacy 
and politics, economic imperialism, using political ma- 
chinery and power to half-cloak, half-champion its ends, 
has no law of Christian sacrifice and no law of Greek 
moderation behind it. On the contrary, what should in- 
terest the Christian preacher, as he regards it, is its sheer 
anarchy, its unashamed and naked paganism. Its law is 
that of the unscrupulous and the daring, not that of the 
compassionate or the just. In what does scientific and 
emotional naturalism issue, then? In this ; a man, if he be 
a man, will stand above divine or human law and make 
it operative only for the weaklings beneath. Wherever 
opportunity offers he will consult his own will and grat- 
ify it to the full. To have, to get, to buy, to sell, to ex- 
ploit the world for power, to exploit one's self for pleas- 
ure, this is to live. The only law is the old primitive 
snarl; each man for himself, let the devil take the hind- 
most. 

There is only one end to such naturalism and that is 
increasing anarchy. It means my will against your will; 
my appetite for gold, for land, for women, for luxury 
and beauty against your appetite; until at length it cul- 
minates in the open madness of physical violence, physi- 
cal destruction, physical death and despair. There can be 
no other end to it. If men dare not risk being the lovers 
of their kind, then they must choose between being the 
slaves of duty or the slaves of force. What are we read- 
92 



EATING, DRINKING AND BEING MERRY 

ing in the public prints and hearing from platform and 
stage? The unending wail for "rights"; the assertion of 
the individual. Ceased is the chant of duty, forgotten the 
sacrifice of love! 

The events which have transformed the world since 
1914 are an awful commentary upon such naturalism 
and a dreadful confirmation of our indictment. Before 
the spectacle that many of us saw on those sodden fields 
of Flanders, both humanist and religionist should be alike 
aghast. How childish not to perceive that its causes, as 
distinguished from its occasions, were common to our 
whole civilization. How perverse not to confess that be- 
neath all our modern life, as its dominating motive, has 
lain that ruthless and pagan philosophy, which creates 
alike the sybarite, the tyrant and the anarch ; the philoso- 
phy in which lust goes hand in hand with cruelty and un- 
restrained will to power is accompanied by unmeasured 
and unscrupulous force. 

It is incredible to me how men can take this delirium 
of self-destruction, this plunging of the sword into our 
own heart in a final frenzy of competing anarchy and 
deck it out with heroic and poetic values, fling over it 
the seamless robe of Christ, unfurl above it the banner of 
the Cross ! The only contribution the World War has 
made to religion has been to throw into intolerable relief 
the essentially irreligious and inhumane character of our 
civilization. 

Of course, the men and the ideals who actually fought 
the contest as distinguished from the men and ideals 
which precipitated it and determined its movements, fill 
gallant pages with their heroism and holy sacrifice. For 
wars are fought by the young at the dictation of the old, 
and youth is everywhere humane and poetic. Thus, if I 

93 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 
may be permitted to quote from a book of mine recently 
published : 

"Our sons were bade to enter it as a 'war to 
end war,' a final struggle which should abolish the intol- 
erable burdens of armaments and conscription. They were 
taught to exalt it as a strife for oppressed and help- 
less peoples ; the prelude to a new brotherhood and coop- 
eration among the nations, and to that reign of justice 
which is the antecedent condition of peace. 

"They did their part. With adventurous faith they glo- 
rified their cause and offered their fresh lives to make it 
good. Their sacrifice, the idealism which lay behind it in 
their respective communities — the unofficial perceptions 
that they, the fathers and mothers and the boys, were 
fighting to vindicate the supremacy of the moral over the 
material factors of life — this has made an imperishable 
gift to the new world and our children's lives. When an 
entire commuity rises to something of magnanimity, and 
a nation identifies its fate with the lot of weaker states, 
then even mutilation and death may be gift-bringers to 
mankind. 

"But it is more significant to our purpose to note that 
the blood of youth had hardly ceased to run before the 
officials began to dicker for the material fruits of con- 
quest. Not, how to obtain peace but how to exploit vic- 
tory — to wrest each for himself the larger tribute from 
the fallen foe — became their primary concern. So the 
youth appear to have died for a tariff, perished for trade 
routes and harbors, for the furthering of the commercial 
advantages of this nation as against that, for the seizing 
of the markets of the world. They supposed they fought 
'to end business of that sort' but they returned to find 
their accredited representatives contemplating universal 

94 



EATING, DRINKING AND BEING MERRY 

military service in frank expectation of 'the next war.' 
They strove for the 'self-determination of peoples' but 
find that it was for some people, but not all. And as for 
the cooperation among nations, Judge Gary has recently 
told us that, as a result of the war, we should prepare 
for 'the fiercest commercial struggle in the history of 
mankind !' M1 

Is it not clear, then, today that behind the determin- 
ing as distinguished from the fighting forces of the war 
there lay a commercial and financial imperialism, directed 
by small and powerful minorities, largely supported by a 
sympathetic press which used the machinery of repre- 
sentative democracy to overthrow a more naked and bru- 
tal imperialism whose machinery was that of a military 
autocracy ? Motives, scales of value, methods and desired 
ends, were much the same for all these small governing 
groups as they operated from behind the various shibbo- 
leths whose magic they used to nerve the arms of the con- 
tending forces. The conclusion of the war has revealed 
the common springs of action of the professional soldier, 
statesman, banker, ecclesiastic, in our present civilization. 
On the whole they accept the rule of physical might as 
the ultimate justification of conduct. They are the lead- 
ers and spokesmen in an economic, social and political 
establishment which, pretending to civilization, always 
turns when strained or imperiled by foreign or domestic 
dangers to physical force as the final arbiter. 

It is truly ominous to see the gradual extension of this 
naturalistic principle still going on in the state. The coal 
strike was settled, not by arbitration, but by conference, 
and "conferences" appear to be replacing disinterested 
arbitration. This means that decisions are being made on 

1 Can the Church Survive? pp. 14 ff. 
95 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

the principle of compromise, dictated by the expediency 
of the moment, not by reference to any third party, or 
to some fixed and mutually recognized standards. This is 
as old as Pythagoras and as new as Bergson and Croce ; 
it assumes that the concept of justice is man-made, pro- 
duced and to be altered by expediences and practicalities, 
always in flux. But the essence of a civilization is the hu- 
manistic conviction that there is something fixed and 
abiding around which life may order and maintain itself. 
Progress rests on the Platonic theory that laws are not 
made by man but discovered by him ; that they exist as 
eternal distinctions beyond the reach of his alteration. 
Again, an unashamed and rampant naturalism has just 
been sweeping this country in the wave of mean and 
cruel intolerance which insists upon the continued im- 
prisonment of political heretics, which would prohibit 
freedom of speech by governmental decree and oppose 
new or distasteful ideas by the physical suppression of the 
thinker. The several and notorious attempts beginning 
with deportations and ending with the unseating of the 
New York assemblymen, to combat radical thinking by 
physical or political persecution — attempts uniformly 
mean and universally impotent in history — are as sinister 
as they are stupid. The only law which justifies the per- 
secution and imprisonment of religious and political here- 
tics is neither the law of reason nor the law of love, but 
the law of fear, hence of tyranny and force. When a 
twentieth-century nation begins to raise the ancient cry, 
"Come now and let us kill this dreamer and we shall see 
what will become of his dreams," that nation is declining 
to the naturalistic level. For this clearly indicates that the 
humane and religious resources of civilization, of which 
the church is among the chief confessed and appointed 

9 6 



EATING, DRINKING AND BEING MERRY 

guardians, are utterly inadequate to the strain imposed 
upon them. Hence force, not justice, though they may 
sometimes have happened to coincide, and power, not 
reason or faith, are becoming the embodiment of the 
state today. 

We come now to the final question of our chapter. How 
has this renewal of naturalism affected the church and V 
Christian preaching? On the whole today, the Protestant \ 
church is accepting this naturalistic attitude. In a signed 
editorial in the New Republic for the last week of De- 
cember, 1919, Herbert Croly said, under the significant 
title of "Disordered Christianity" : "Both politicians and 
property owners consider themselves entitled to ignore 
Christian guidance in exercising political and economic 
power, to expect or to compel the clergy to agree with 
them and if necessary to treat disagreement as negligible. 
The Christian church, as a whole, or in part, does not 
protest against the practically complete secularization of 
political, economic and social life." 

You may say such extra-ecclesiastical strictures are un- 
sympathetic and ill informed. But here is what Washing- 
ton Gladden wrote in January, 1918 : "If after the war 
the church keeps on with the same old religion, there will 
be the same old hell on earth that religious leaders have 
been preparing for centuries, the full fruit of which we 
are gathering now. The church must cease to sanction 
those principles of militaristic and atheistic nationalism 
by which the rulers of the earth have so long kept the 
earth at war." 1 Thus from within the sanctuary is the 
same indictment of our naturalism. 

But you may say Dr. Gladden was an old man and a 
little extreme in some of his positions and he belonged to 

1 The Pacific, January 17, 1918. 
97 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

a past generation. But there are many signs at the present 
moment of the increasing secularizing of our churches. 
The individualism of our services, their casual character, 
their romantic and sentimental music, their minimizing 
of the offices of prayer and devotion, their increasing 
turning of the pulpit into a forum for political discus- 
sion and a place of common entertainment all indicate it. 
There is an accepted secularity today about the organiza- 
tion. Church and preacher have, to a large degree, relin- 
quished their essential message, dropped their religious 
values. We are pretty largely today playing our game 
the world's way. We are adopting the methods and ac- 
cepting the standards of the market. In an issue last 
month of the Inter-Church Bulletin was the following 
headline: "Christianity Hand in Hand with Business," 
and underneath the following: 

"George W. Wickersham, formerly United States 
attorney-general, says in an interview that there is noth- 
ing incompatible between Christianity and modern busi- 
ness methods. A leading lay official of the Episcopal 
Church declares that what the churches need more than 
anything else is a strong injection of business method into 
their management. 'Some latter-day Henry Drummond/ 
he said, 'should write a book on Business Law in the 
Spiritual World.' " 

In this same paper, in the issue of March 27, 1920, 
there was an article commending Christian missions. 
The first caption ran: "Commercial Progress Follows 
Work of Protestant Missions," and its subtitle was 
"How Missionaries Aid Commerce." Here is Business 
Law in the Spiritual World! Here is the church com- 
mended to the heathen and the sinner as an advertising 
agent, an advance guard of commercial prosperity, a 



EATING, DRINKING AND BEING MERRY 

hawker of wares! If the Bulletin ever penetrates to 
those benighted lands of the Orient upon which we are 
thus anxious to bestow the so apparent benefits of our 
present civilization it is conceivable that even the untu- 
tored savage, to say nothing of Chinamen and Japanese, 
might read it with his tongue in his cheek. 

Such naive opportunism and frantic immediacy would 
seem to me conclusive proof of the disintegration and 
anarchy of the spirit within the sanctuary. It is a part of 
it all that everyone has today what he is pleased to call 
"his own religion." And nearly everyone made it himself, 
or thinks he did. Conscience has ceased to be a check 
upon personal impulse, the "thou shalt not" of the soul 
addressed to untutored desires, and become an amiable 
instinct for doing good to others. The Christian is an ef- 
fusive creature, loving everything and everybody; exalt- 
ing others in terms of himself. We abhor religious con- 
ventions ; in particular we hasten to proclaim that we are 
free from the stigma of orthodoxy. We do not go to 
church to learn, to meditate, to repent and to pray; we 
go to be happy, to learn how to keep young and prosper- 
ous ; it is good business ; it pays. We have a new and 
most detestable cant; someone has justly said that the 
natural man in us has been masquerading as the spirit- 
ual man by endlessly prating of "courage," "patriotism" 
— what crimes have been committed in its name! — "de- 
velopment of backward people," "brotherhood of man," 
"service of those less fortunate than ourselves," "natural 
ethical idealism," "the common destinies of nations" — 
and now he rises up and glares at us with stained fingers 
and bloodshot eyes I 1 In so far as we have succumbed to 
naturalism, we have become cold and shrewd and flexible; 

'''Rousseau and Romanticism, p. 376. 
99 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

shallow and noisy and effusive; have been rather proud 
to believe anything in general and almost nothing in par- 
ticular; become a sort of religious jelly fish, bumping 
blindly about in seas of sentiment and labeling' that peace 
and brotherhood and religion! 

Here, then, is the state of organized religion today in 
our churches. They are voluntary groups of men and 
women, long since emancipated from the control of the 
church as such, or of the minister as an official, set free 
also from allegiance to historic statements, traditional, 
intellectual sanctions of our faith; moulded by the time 
spirit which enfolds them to a half-unconscious ignoring 
or depreciation of what must always be the fundamental 
problem of religion — the relationship of the soul, not 
to its neighbor, but to God. Hence the almost total 
absence of doctrinal preaching — indeed, how dare we 
preach Christian doctrine to the industry and politics 
and conduct of this age? Hence the humiliating striving 
to keep up with popular movements, to conform to the 
moment. Hence the placid acceptance of military propa- 
ganda and even of vindictive exhortation. 

Is it any wonder then that we cannot compete with 
the state or the world for the loyalty of men and 
women? We have no substitute to offer. Who need 
be surprised at the restlessness, the fluidity, the elusive- 
ness of the Protestant laity? And who need wonder that 
at this moment we are depending upon the externals of 
machinery, publicity and money to reinstate ourselves as 
a spiritual society in the community? A well-known of- 
ficial of our communion, speaking before a meeting of 
ministers in New York City on Tuesday, March 23, was 
quoted in the Springfield Republican of the next day as 
saying : "The church holds the only cure for the possible 



EATING, DRINKING AND BEING MERRY 

anarchy of the future and offers the only preventative 
for the hell which we have had for the last five years. 
But to meet this challenge the church can only go as 
far — as the money permits." 

Has not the time arrived when, if we are to find our- 
again in the world, we should ask, What is this re- 
ligion in which we believe? What is the real nature of its 
resources? What the real nature of its remedies? Do 
we dare define it? And, if we do, would we dare to assert 
it, come out from the world and live for it, in the midst 
of the paganism of this moment? Is it true that without 
the loaves and the fishes we can do nothing? If so, then 
we, too, have succumbed to naturalism indeed! 



CHAPTER FOUR 
The Unmeasured Gulf 

YOU may remember that when Daniel Webster 
made his reply to Hayne in the Senate he began 
the argument by a return to first principles. 
"When the mariner," said he, "has been tossed for many 
days in thick weather and on an unknown sea, he nat- 
urally avails himself of the first pause in the storm, the 
earliest glance of the sun, to take his latitude, and ascer- 
tain how far the elements have driven him from his true 
course. Let us imitate this prudence and before we float 
further on the waves of this debate, refer to the point 
from which we departed." He then asked for the reading 
of the resolution. 

It is to some such rehearsing of our original message, a 
restatement of the thesis which we, as preachers, are set 
to commend, that we turn ourselves in these pages. The 
brutal dislocations of the war, and the long and confused 
course of disintegrating life that lay behind it, have 
driven civilization from its true course and deflected the 
church from her normal path, her natural undertakings. 
Let us try, then, to get back to our charter; define once 
more what we really stand for ; view our human life, not 
as captain of industry, or international politician, or pa- 
gan worldling, or even classic hero, would regard it, but 
see it through the eyes of a Paul, an Augustine, a Ber- 
nard, a Luther, the Lord Jesus. We have already re- 
marked how timely and necessary is this redefining of our 
102 



THE UNMEASURED GULF 

religious values. If, as Lessing said, it is the end of edu- 
to make men to see things that are large as large 
and things that are small as small, it is even more truly 
the end of Christian preaching. What we are most in need 
a corrected perspective of our faith ; without 
it we darken counsel as we talk in confusion. So, while we 
may not attempt here a detailed and reasoned statement 
of religious belief, we may try to say what is the funda- 
mental attitude, both toward nature and toward man, that 
lies underneath the religious experience. We have seen 
that we are not stating that attitude very clearly nowa- 
days in our pulpits; hence we are often dealing there 
with >entimental or stereotyped or humane or even pagan 
interpretations. Yet nothing is more fatal for us; if we 
peddle other men's wares they will be very sure that we 
despise our own. 

We approach, then, the third and final level of experi- 
ence to which we referred in the first lecture. We have 
seen that the humanist accepts the law of measure; he; 
rests back upon the selected and certified experience of 
his race ; from within himself, as the noblest inhabitant 
of the planet, and by the further critical observation of 
nature he proposes to interpret and guide his life. He is 
convinced that this combined authority of reason and ob- 
servation will lead to the summum bonum of the golden 
mean in which unbridled self-expression will be seen as 
equally unwise and indecent and ascetic repression as both 
unworthy and unnecessary. It is important to again re- 
mind ourselves that confidence in the human spirit as the 
master of its own fate, and in reason and natural obser- 
vation as offering it the means of this self-control and 
understanding, are essential humanistic principles. The 
humanist world is rational, social, ethical. 
103 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

Over against this reasonable and disciplined view of 
man and of his world stands naturalism. It exploits the 
defects of the classic "virtue" ; it is, so to speak, human- 
ism run to seed. Just as religion so often sinks into big- 
otry, cruelty and superstitition, so humanism, in lesser 
souls, declines to egotism, license and sentimentality. 
Naturalism, either by a shallow and insincere use of the 
materialistic view of the universe, or by the exalting of 
wanton feeling and whimsical fancy as ends in them- 
selves, attempts the identification of man with the natural 
order, permits him to conceive of each desire, instinct, 
impulse, as, being natural, thereby defensible and valua- 
ble. Hence it permits him to disregard the imposed laws 
of civilization — those fixed points of a humane order — 
and to return in principle, and so far as he dares in action, 
to the unlimited and irresponsible individualism of the 
horde. Inevitably the law of the jungle is deliberately ex- 
alted, or unconsciously adopted, over against the human- 
ist law of moderation and discipline. 

The humanist, then, critically studies nature and man- 
kind, finding in her matrix and in his own spirit data 
for the guidance of the race, improving upon it by a culti- 
vated and collective experience. The naturalist uncriti- 
cally exalts nature, seeks identification with it so that he 
may freely exploit both himself and it. The faith of the 
one is in the self-sufficiency of the disciplined spirit of 
mankind; the unfaith of the other is in its glorification 
of the natural world and in its allegiance to the momen- 
tary devices and desires of the separate heart. It will be 
borne in mind that these definitions are too clear-cut ; that 
these divisions appear in the complexities of human ex- 
perience, blurred and modified by the welter of cross 
currents, subsidiary conflicting movements, which ob- 
104 



THE UNMEASURED GULF 

scure all human problems. They represent genuine and 
significant divisions of thought and conduct. But they 
appear in actual experience as controlling emphases 
rather than mutually exclusive territories. 

Now, the clearest way to get before us the religious 
view of the world and the law which issues from it is to 
contrast it with the other two. In the first place, the re- 
ligious temperament takes a very different view of na- 
ture than either romantic, or to a less degree scientific, 
naturalism. Naturalism is subrational on the one hand or 4 
non-imaginative on the other, in that it emphasizes the 
continuity between man and the physical universe. The 
religious man is superrational and nobly imaginative as 
he emphasizes the difference between man and nature. 
He does not forget man's biological kinship to the brute, 
his intimate structural and even psychological relation to 
the primates, but he is aware that it is not in dwell- 
ing upon these facts that his spirit discovers what is dis- 
tinctive to man as man. That he believes will be found 
by accenting the chasm between man and nature. He does 
not know how to conceive of a personal being except by 
thinking of him as proceeding by other, though not con- 
flicting, laws and by moving toward different secondary 
ends from those laws and ends which govern the imper- 
sonal external world. This sense of the difference be- 
tween man and nature he shares with the humanist, only 
the humanist does not carry it as far as he does and 
hence may not draw from it his ultimate conclusions. 

The religious view, then, begins with the perception of 
man's isolation in the natural order; his difference from 
his surroundings. That sense of separateness is funda- 
mental to the religious nature. The false sentiment and 
partial science of the pagan which stresses the identi- 

105 



y-3 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

heat ion of man and beast is the first quarrel that religion- 
ist and humanist alike have with him. Neither of them 
sanctions this perversion of thought and feeling which 
either projects the impressionistic self so absurdly and 
perilously into the natural order, or else minimizes man's 
imaginative and intellectual power, leveling him down to 
the amoral instinct of the brute. "How much more," said 
Jesus, "is a man better than a sheep!" One of the great- 
est of English humanists was Matthew Arnold. You re- 
member his sonnet, entitled, alas ! "To a Preacher," 
which runs as follows : 

" In harmony with Nature ? Restless fool, 
Who with such heat doth preach what were to thee, 
When true, the last impossibility — 
To be like Nature strong, like Nature cool ! 
Know, man hath all which Nature hath, but more, 
And in that more lie all his hopes of good, 
Nature is cruel, man is sick of blood ; 
Nature is stubborn, man would fain adore ; 
Nature is fickle, man hath need of rest ; 
Nature forgives no debt and fears no grave ; 
Man would be mild, and with safe conscience blest. 
Man must begin; know this, where Nature ends; 
Nature and man can never be fast friends. 
Fool, if thou canst not pass her, rest her slave!" 

Religionist and humanist alike share this clear sense 
of separateness. Literature is full of the expression of 
it. Religion, in especial, has little to do with the natural 
world as such. It is that other and inner one, which can 
make a hell of heaven, a heaven of hell, with which it 
is chiefly concerned. Who can forget Othello's soliloquy 
106 



THE UNMEASURED GULF 

as he prepares to darken his marriage chamber before 
the murder of his wife? 

" Put out the light, and then put out the light. 
If I quench thee, thou flaming minister, 
I can again thy former light restore, 
Should I repent me ; but once put out thy light, 
Thou cunning'st pattern of excelling nature, 
I know not where is that Promethean heat, 
That can thy light relume. When I have pluck'd the 

rose 
I cannot give it vital growth again, 
It needs must wither." 

Indeed, how vivid to us all is this difference between 
man and nature. "I would to heaven," Byron traced on 
the back of the manuscript of Don Juan, 

" 1 would to heaven that I were so much clay, 
As I am bone, blood, marrow, passion, feeling." 

Ah me ! So at many times would most of us. And in that 
sense that we are not is where the religious consciousness 
takes its beginning. 

Here is the sense of the gap between man and the nat- 
ural world felt because man has no power over it. He 
cannot swerve nor modify its laws, nor do his laws ac- 
knowledge its ascendency over them. But what makes 
the gulf deeper is the sense of the immeasurable moral 
difference between a thinking, feeling, self-estimating 
being and all this unheeding world about him. Whatever 
it is thatlooks out from the windows of our eyes some- 
thing not merely of wonder and desire but also of fear 
and repulsion must be there as it gazes into so cruel as 
well as so alien an environment. For a moral being to 
107 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

glorify nature as such is pure folly or sheer sentimental- 
ity. For he knows that her apparent repose and beauty is 
built up on the ruthless and unending warfare of matched 
forces, it represents a dreadful equilibrium of pain. He 
knows, too, that that in him which allies him with this 
natural world is his baser, not his better part. This nobly 
pessimistic attitude toward the natural universe and 
toward man so far as he shares in its characteristics, is 
found in all classic systems of theology- and has dominated 
the greater part of Christian thinking. If it is ignored to- 
day by the pseudo-religionists and the sentimentalists ; it 
is clearly enough perceived by contemporary science and 
contemporary art. The biologist understands it. "I know 
of no study," wrote Thomas Huxley, "which is so unut- 
terably saddening as that of the evolution of humanity 
as set forth in the annals of history. Out of the darkness 
of prehistoric ages man emerges with the marks of his 
lowly origin strong upon him. He is a brute, only more 
intelligent than the other brutes ; a blind prey to impulses 
which as often as not lead him to destruction ; a victim 
to endless illusions which make his mental existence a 
terror and a burden, and fill his physical life with barren 
toil and battle. He attains a certain degree of comfort, 
and develops a more or less workable theory of life in 
such favorable situations as the plains of Mesopotamia 
or of Egypt, and then, for thousands and thousands of 
years struggles with various fortunes, attended by infi- 
nite wickedness, bloodshed and misery, to maintain him- 
self at this point against the greed and ambition of his 
fellow men. He makes a point of killing and otherwise per- 
secuting all those who first try to get him to move on ; and 
when he has moved a step farther he foolishly confers 
post-mortem deification on his victims. He exactly re- 
108 



THE UNMEASURED GULF 

peats the process with all who want to move a step yet 
farther." 1 

And no less does the artist, the man of high and cor- 
rect feeling, perceive the immeasurable distance between 
uncaring nature and suffering men and women. There is, 
for instance, the passage in The Education of Henry 
Adams, in which Adams speaks of the death of his sister 
at Bagni di Lucca. "In the singular color of the Tuscan 
atmosphere, the hills and vineyards of the Apennines 
seemed bursting with midsummer blood. The sick room 
itself glowed with the Italian joy of life; friends filled 
it ; no harsh northern lights pierced the soft shadows ; 
even the dying woman shared the sense of the Italian 
summer, the soft velvet air, the humor, the courage, the 
sensual fullness of Nature and man. She faced death, as 
women mostly do, bravely and even gayly, racked slowly 
to unconsciousness but yielding only to violence, as a 
soldier sabred in battle. For many thousands of years, 
on these hills and plains, Nature had gone on sabring men 
and women with the same air of sensual pleasure. 

"Impressions like these are not reasoned or catalogued 
in the mind; they are felt as a part of violent emotion; 
and the mind that feels them is a different one from that 
which reasons; it is thought of a different power and a 
different person. The first serious consciousness of Na- 
ture's gesture — her attitude toward life — took form then 
as a phantasm, a nightmare, an insanity of force. For the 
first time the stage scenery of the senses collapsed; the 
human mind felt itself stripped naked, vibrating in a void 
of shapeless energies, with resistless mass, colliding, 
crushing, wasting and destroying what these same ener- 
gies had created and labored from eternity to perfect." 

1 "Agnosticism," the Nineteenth Century, February, 1889. 
109 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

Here is a vivid interpretation of a universal human ex- 
perience. Alight not any one of us who had endured it 
turn upon the pagan and sentimentalist, crying in the mood 
of a Swift or a Voltaire, "Ca vous amuse, la vie?'? The 
abstract natural rights of the eighteenth century smack 
of academic complacency before this. The indignation we 
feel against the insolent individualism of a Louis XIV 
who cried "L'ctat if est nwi!'' or against the industrial 
overlord who spills the tears of women for his ambition, 
the sweat of the children for his greed, is as nothing 
beside the indignation with the natural order which 
any biological study would arouse except as the 
scientist perceives that indignation is, for him, beside the 
point and the religionist believes that it proceeds from 
not seeing far enough into the process. This is why there 
is an essential absurdity in any naturalistic system of 
ethics. Even the clown can say, 

" Here's a night that pities 
Neither wise men nor fools." 

This common attitude of the religionist toward nature 
as a remote and cruel world, alien to our spirits, is abun- 
dantly reflected in literature. It finds a sort of final con- 
summation in the intuitive insight, the bright understand- 
ing of the creative spirits of our race. What Aristotle 
defines as the tragic emotions, the sense of the terror and 
the pity of human life, arise partly from this perception 
of the isolation always and keenly felt by dramatist and 
prophet and poet. They know well that Nature does not 
exist by our law ; that we neither control nor understand 
it ; is it not our friend ? 

There is, then, the law of identity between man and 
nature, found in their common physical origin ; there is 



THE UNMEASURED GULF 

also the law of difference. It is on that aspect of reality 
that religion places its emphasis. It is with this approach 
to understanding ourselves that preachers, as distin- 
guished from scientists, deal. Our present society is 
traveling farther and farther away from reality in so far 
as it turns either to the outside world of fact, or to the 
domain of natural law, expecting to find in these the ele- 
ments of insight for the fresh guidance of the human 
spirit. Not there resides the secret of the beings of whom 
Shelley said, 

" We look before and after 
And pine for what is not, 
Our sincerest laughter 
With some pain is fraught." 

Instinct is a base, a prime factor, part of the matrix of 
personality. But personality is not instinct; it is instinct 
plus a different force; instinct transformed by spiritual 
insight and controlled by moral discipline. The man of re- 
ligion, therefore, finds himself not in one but two worlds, 
not indeed mutually exclusive, having a common origin, 
but nevertheless significantly distinct. Each is incomplete 
without the other, each in a true sense non-existent with- 
out the other. But that which is most vital to man's world 
is unknown in the domain of nature. Already the percep- 
tion of a dualism is here. 

But now a third element comes into it. There is some- 
thing spiritually common to nature and man behind the 
one, within the other. This Something is the origin, the 
responsible agent for man's and nature's physical iden- 
tity. This Something binds the separates into a sort of 
whole. This, I suppose, is what Professor Hocking re- 
fers to when he says, "the original source of the knowl- 
iii 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

edge of God is an experience which might be described 
as of not being alone in knowing the world, and especially 
the world of nature." 1 Thus the religious man recognizes 
beyond the gulf, behind the chasm, something more like 
himself than it. When he contemplates nature, he sees 
something other than nature ; not a world which is what 
it seems to be, but a world whose chief significance is that 
it is more than it seems to be. It is a world where appear- 
anceand reality are inextricably mingled andyet sublimely 
and significantly separate. In short, the naturalist, the pa- 
gan, takes the world as it stands ; it is just what it ap- 
pears; the essence of his irreligion is that he perceives 
nothing in it that needs to be explained. But the religion- 
ist knows that the world which lies before our mortal 
vision so splendid and so ruthless, so beautiful and so 
dreadful, does really gain both its substance and signifi- 
cance from immaterial and unseen powers. It is signifi- 
cant not in itself but because it hides the truth. It points 
forever to a beyond. It is the vague and insubstantial 
pageant of a dream. Behind it, within the impenetrable 
shadows, stands the Infinite Watcher of the sons of men. 

In every age religious souls have voiced this unearthli- 
ness of reality, the noble other-worldliness of the goals of 
the natural order. "Heard melodies are sweet, but un- 
heard melodies are sweeter." Poet, philosopher and mystic 
have sung their song or proclaimed their message know- 
ing that they w r ere moving about in worlds not realized, 
clearly perceiving the incompleteness of the phenomenal 
world and the delusive nature of sense perceptions. They 
have known a Reality which they could not comprehend ; 
felt a Presence which they could not grasp. They have 
found strength for the battle and peace for the pain by 

1 The Meaning of God in Human Experience, p. 236. 



THE UNMEASURED GULF 

regarding nature as a dim projection, a tantalizing inti- 
mation of that other, conscious and creative life, that 
originating and directive force, which is not nature any 
more than the copper wire is the electric fluid which it 
carries — a force which was before it, which moves within 
it, which shall be after it. 

So poet and believer and mystic find the key to nature, 
the interpretation of that alien and cruel world, not by 
sinking to its indifferent level, not by sentimental exalta- 
tion of its specious peace, its amoral cruelty and beauty, 
but by regarding it as the expression, the intimation 
rather, of a purposive Intelligence, a silent and infinite 
Force, beyond it all. So the pagan effuses over nature, 
gilding with his sentimentality the puddles that the beasts 
would cough at. And the scientist is interested in efficient 
causes, seeing nature as an unbroken sequence, an endless 
uniformity of cause and effect, against whose iron chain 
the spirit of mankind wages a foredoomed but never 
ending revolt. But the religionist, confessing the ruthless 
indifference, the amorality which he distrusts and fears, 
and not denying the majestic uniformity of order, never- 
theless declares that these are not self-made, that the 
amorality is but one half and that the confusing half of 
the tale. The whole creation indeed groaneth and tra- 
vaileth in pain, but for a final cause, which alone inter- 
prets or justifies it, and which eventually shall set it free. 
As a matter of fact, nearly all poets and artists thus view 
nature in the light of final causes, though often instinc- 
tively and unconsciously so. For what they sing or paint 
or mould is not the landscape that we see, the flesh we 
touch, but the life behind it, the light that never was on 
land or sea. What they give us is not a photograph or an 
inventory — it is worlds away from such naive and lying 

113 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 
realism. But they hint at the inexpressible behind expres- 
sion ; paint the beauty which is indistinguishable from na- 
ture but not identical with Nature. They make us see that 
not she, red in tooth and claw, but that intangible and 
supernal something-more, is what gives her the cleansing 
hath of loveliness. No reflective or imaginative person 
needs to be greatly troubled, therefore, by any purely 
mechanical or materialistic conception of the universe. 
They who would commend that view of the cosmos have 
not only to reckon with philosophical and religious ideal- 
ism, but also with all the bright band of poets and ar- 
tists and seers. Such an issue once resolutely forced 
w«»ul<l therewith collapse, for it would pit the qualitative 
standards against the quantitative, the imagination 
against literalism, the creative spirit in man against the 
machine in him. 

Here, then, is the difference between the naturalist's 
and the religionist's attitude toward Nature. The believer 
judges Nature, well aware of the gulf between himself 
and her, hating with inexpressible depth of indignation 
and repudiating with profound contempt the sybarite's 
identification of human and natural law. But also he 
comes back to her, not to accept in wonder her variable 
outward form, but to worship in awe before her invaria- 
ble inner meaning. Sometimes, like so many of the hu- 
manists, he rises only to a vague sense of the mystic 
unity that fills up the interspaces of the world, and cries 
with Wordsworth : 

" . . . And I have felt 
A presence that disturbs me with the joy 
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime 
Of something far more deeply interfused, 
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
114 



THE UNMEASURED GULF 

And the round ocean and the living air, 
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man; 
A motion and a spirit, that impels 
All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
And rolls through all things." 1 

Sometimes he dares to personalize this ultimate and then 
ascends to the supreme poetry of the religious experi- 
ence and feels the cosmic consciousness, the eternal "I" 
of this strange world, which fills it with observant maj- 
esty. And then he chants, 

" The heavens declare the glory of God, 
The firmament showeth his handiwork." 

Or he whispers, 

" Whither shall I go from Thy spirit, 
Or whither shall I flee from Thy presence ? 
If I ascend up into heaven, Thou art there, 
If I make my bed in hell, behold Thou art there, 
If I take the wings of the morning 
And dwell in the uttermost parts of the earth, 
Even there shall Thy hand lead me 
And Thy right hand shall hold me." 2 

Indeed, the devout religionist almost never thinks of na- 
ture as such. She is always the bush which flames and is 
not consumed. Therefore he walks softly all his days, 
conscious that God is near. 

" Of old," he says, "Thou hast laid the foundations of 
the earth; 
And the heavens are the work of Thy hands. 

1 Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey, stanza 3, 
11. 36-45. 

2 Psalm cxxxix. 7-9. 

115 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

They shall perish, but Thou shalt endure ; 

Yea, all of them shall wax old like a garment; 

As a vesture shalt Thou change them, and they shall 

be changed; 
But Thou art the same, 
And Thy years shall have no end." 1 

To him nature is the glass through which he sees 
darkly and often with a darkling mind, the all-perva- 
sive Presence; it is the veil — the veil that covers the face 
of God. 

Here, then, we have the contrasting attitude of world- 
ling and believer toward nature, the outward universe. 
Now we come to the contrasting attitude of humanist 
and believer toward man. the world within. For why/ 
are we so sure, first, of the chasm between ourselves and 
Nature and. second, that we can bridge that chasm by 
reaching out to something behind and beyond her which 
is more like us than her? What gives us the key to her 
dualism? Why do we think that there is Something which 
perpetually beckons to us through her, makes awful 
signs of an intimate and significant relationship? Be- 
cause we feel a similar chasm, an equal cleft in our own 
hearts, a division in the moral nature of mankind. We 
know that gulf between us and the outward world be- 
cause we know the greater gulf between flesh and spirit, 
between the natural man and the real man, between the 
"I" and the "other I." 

Here is where the humanist bids us good-by and we 
must go forward on our road alone. For he will not ac- 
knowledge that there is anything essential or permanent 
in that divided inner world ; he would minimize it or ex- 
i Psalm cii. 25-27. 

116 



THE UNMEASURED GULF 

plain it away. But we know it is there and the reason we 
know there is Something without which can bridge the 
outer chasm is because we also know there is Something- 
Else within which might bridge this one. For we who are 
religious know that within the depths and the immensities 
of this inner world, where there is no space but where 
there is infinite largeness, where there is no time but 
where there is perpetual strife, there is Something- 
Else as well as the "I" and the "other I," and it is that 
He who is the Something-Else who alone can close the 
gap in that divided kingdom and make us one with our- 
selves, hence with Himself and hence with His world. 

You ask how we can say, "He's there; He knows." 
We answer that this "other," this "He" is a constant fig- 
ure in the experience; always in the vision; an integral 
part of the perception. What is He like? "He" is purity 
and compassion and inexorableness. Something fixed, im- 
mutable, not to be tricked, not to be evaded and oh ! all- 
comprehending. He sees, his eyes run to and fro in all the 
dark and wide, the light and high dominions of the soul. 
If we will not come to terms with "Him," that eternal 
and changeless life will be the cliff against which the 
tumultuous waves of the divided spirit shall shatter and 
dissipate into soundless foam ; if we will come to terms, 
relinquish, accept, surrender, then that purity and that 
compassion will be the cleansing tide, the healing and 
restoring flood in which we sink in the ecstasy of self-loss 
to arise refreshed, radiant, and made whole. 

So we reckon from within out. The religious view of the 
world is based upon the religious experience of the soul. 
We have no other means of getting at reality. I know that 
there is Something-more than me and Something-more 
than the nature outside of me, because we know that 
117 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

there is Something which is not me and is not nature, in- 
side of me. So the man of religion, like any other poet, 
artist, seer, looks in his own heart and writes. What 
he finds there is real, or else, as far as he is con- 
cerned, there is no reality. He does not assert that this 
reality is the final and utter truth. But he knows it is his 
trustworthy mediator of that truth. 

Here, then, is an immense separation between religion- 
ist and both humanist and naturalist; a separation so 
complete as to come full circle. We are convinced of the 
secondary value, both of natural appearances and of the 
mortal, temporal consciousness. So we substitute for im- 
pertinent familiarity with Nature, a reverent regard for 
what she half reveals, half hides. We interpret her by 
ourselves. We are the same compound of identity and 
difference. We acknowledge our continuity with the nat- 
ural world, our intimate and tragic alliance with the dust, 
but we also know that we, within ourselves, are Some- 
thing-Else as well. And it is that Something-Else in us 
which makes the significant part of us, which sets our 
value and place in the scale of being. 

In short, the dualism of nature is revealed in the dual- 
ism of the soul. There is a gulf within, and if only man 
can span the inner chasm, he will know how to bridge the 
outer. He must begin by finding God within himself, or 
he will never find Him anywhere. Now, it is out of this 
sense of a separation within himself, from himself 
and from the Author of himself, that there arises that 
awful sense of helplessness, of dependence, of be- 
wilderment, which is the second great element in the re- 
ligious life. Man is alone in the world; man is helpless 
in the world ; man ought not to be alone in the world ; 
man is therefore under scrutiny and condemnation; he 
118 



THE UNMEASURED GULF 

must find reconciliation, harmony, companionship, 
somehow, somewhere. Hence the religious man is not 
arrogant like the pagan, nor proud like the humanist ; he 
is humble. It is Burke, I think, who says that the whole 
ethical life of man has its roots in this humility. 1 The 
religious man cannot help but be humble. He has an awful 
pride in his kinship with heaven, but, standing before 
the Lord of heaven, he feels human nature's proper 
place, its confusion and division and helplessness ; its de- 
pendence upon the higher Power. 

It is at this point that humanism and religion definitely 
part company. The former does not feel this absolute and 
judging Presence, hence cannot understand the spirit- 
ual solicitude of the latter. St. Paul was not quite at 
home on Mars Hill ; it was hard to make those who were 
always hearing and seeing some new thing understand; 
the shame and humility of the cross were an unnecessary 
foolishness to them. So they have always been. The hu- 
manist cannot take seriously this sense of a transcendent 
reality. When Cicero, to escape the vengeance of Clodius, 
withdrew from Rome, he passed over into Greece and 
dwelt for a while in Thessalonica. One day he saw 
Mount Olympus, the lofty and eternal home of the dei- 
ties of ancient Greece. "But I," said the bland eclectic 
philosopher, "saw nothing but snow and ice." 

How inadequate, then, as a substitute for religion, is 
even the noblest humanism. True and fine as far as it 
goes, it does not go far enough for us. It takes too little 
account of the divided life. It appears not to understand 
it. On the whole it refuses to acknowledge that it really 
exists, or, if it does, it is convinced of man's unaided 
ability to efface it. It isn't something inevitable. Hence 

1 Correspondence, III, p. 213. 

119 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

the pride which is an essential quality of the humanistic 
attitude. 

But the religious man knows that it does exist and 
that while he is not wholly responsible for it, yet he is 
essentially so and that, alas, in spite of that fact, he alone 
cannot bridge it. So he cries, "Wretched man that I am, 
what shall I do to be saved?" Here is the feeling of un- 
easiness, the sense of something being wrong about us 
as we naturally stand, of which James speaks. In that 
sense of responsibility is the confession of sin and in the 
confession of sin is the acknowledgment of the impo- 
tence of the sinner. 

" The moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on 
Nor all your wit nor all your tears, can wash a line of 

it." 

Man cannot, unaided, make his connection with this 
higher power. The world is at fault, yes, but we are at 
fault, something both within and without dreadfully 
needs explaining. So man is subdued and troubled by the 
infinite mystery ; and he cannot accept the place in which 
he finds himself in that mystery; he is ashamed of it. 

Vivid, then, is his sense of helplessness ! It makes him 
resent the humanist, who bids him, unaided, solve his 
fate and be a man. That is giving him stones when he 
asks for bread. He knows that advice makes an inhuman 
demand upon the will ; it assumes a reasonableness, an in- 
sight and a moral power, which for him do not exist; 
it ignores or it denies the reality and the meaning of this 
inner gulf. It is important to note that even as philosophy 
and art and literature soon parted company with the nat- 
uralist, so, to a large degree, they part company with the 
humanist, too. They do not know very much of an harmo- 



THE UNMEASURED GULF 

nious and triumphant universe. Few of the world's 
creative spirits have ever denied that inner chasm or 
minimized its tragic consequences to mankind. Isaiah 
and Paul and John and Augustine and Luther are wrung 
with the consciousness of it. Indeed, the antithesis be- 
tween flesh and spirit is too familiar in religious lit- 
erature to need any recounting. It is more vividly 
brought home to us from the nonprofessional, the disin- 
terested and involuntary testimony of secular writing. 
Was there ever such a cry of revolt on the part of the 
trapped spirit against the net and slough of natural val- 
ues and natural desires as runs through the sonnets of 
William Shakespeare? We remember the 104th: 

" Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth, 
Foiled by these rebel powers that thee array, 
Why dost thou pine within, and suffer dearth, 
Painting thine outward walls so costly gay? 
Why so large cost, having so short a lease, 
Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend? 
Shall worms, inheritors of this excess, 
Eat up thy charge ? Is this thy body's end ? 
Then soul, live thou upon thy servant's loss 
And let that pine to aggravate thy store, 
Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross 
Within be fed, without be rich no more — " 

Or turn to our contemporary poet, James Stephens : 

" Good and bad are in my heart 
But I cannot tell to you 
For they never are apart 
Which is the better of the two. 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

I am this : I am the other 
And the devil is my brother 
And my father he is God 
And my mother is the sod, 
Therefore I am safe, you see 
( hying to my pedigree. 

So I cherish love and hate 
Like twin brothers in a nest 
Lest I find when it's too late 
That the other was the best." 1 
Here, then, we find the next thing which grows out of 
man's sense of separation both from nature and from 
his own best self. It is his moral judgment on himself as 
well as on the world outside, and that power to judge 
shows that he is greater than either. As Dr. Gordon says, 
"Every honest man lives under the shadow of his own 
rebuke." We can go far with the humanist in acknowl- 
edging the failures that are due to environment, to in- 
completeness, to ignorance ; we do not forget the help- 
less multitude who sit in darkness and in the shadow of 
death ; and we agree with the scientist that their help- 
lessness foredooms them and that their fate cannot be 
laid to their charge. But we go far beyond where scien- 
tist and humanist stop. For we know that the deepest 
cause of human misery is not inheritance, is not environ- 
ment, is not ignorance, is not incompleteness; it is the in- 
formed but the perverse human will. Just as unhappiness 
is the consciousness of the divided mind, so guilt is this 
sense of the deliberately divided will. Jonathan Swift 
knew that ; on every yearly recurrence of the hour in 
which he came into the world, he cried lamentably, "Let 
the day perish wherein I was born." 
1 Songs from the Clay, p. 40. 

122 



THE UNMEASURED GULF 

The Lord Jesus knew it, too. His teaching, unlike that 
of Paul, does not throw into the foreground the divided 
will and its accompanying sense of sin and guilt. But he 
does not ignore it. He brought it out with infinite tender- 
ness but inexorable clearness in the parables of the lost 
sheep, the lost coin and the lost boy. The sheep were but 
young and silly, they did not wish to be lost on the 
mountain-side; they knew no better; inexperience, ig- 
norance were theirs, and for their sad estate they were 
not held responsible. For them the compassionate shep- 
herd sought until he found them in the wilds, took them, 
involuntary burdens, on his heart, brought them back to 
safety and the fold. The coin had no native affinity with 
the dirt and grime of the careless woman's house. It was 
only a coin, attached to anklet or bracelet, having no 
power, no independence of its own; where it fell, there 
must it lie. So with the lives set by fate in the refuse 
and grime of our industrial civilization, the pure minted 
gold effectually concealed by the obscurity and filth 
around. For such lives, victims of environment, the Fa- 
ther will search, too, until they are found, taken up, and 
somewhere, in this world or another, restored to their 
native worth. But the chief of the parables, and the one 
that has captured the imagination and subdued the heart 
of mankind, because it so true to the greater part of life, 
is the story of the lost boy. For he was the real sinner and 
he was such because, knowing what he was about and able 
to choose, he desired to do wrong. It was not ignorance, 
nor environment, nor inheritance, that led him into the 
far country. It was its alien delights and their alien na- 
ture, for which as such he craved. How subtle and certain 
is the word of Jesus here. No shepherd seeks this wander- 
ing sheep ; no householder searches for this lost coin. 
123 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

The boy who willed to do wrong must stay with the swine 
among the husks until he wills to do right. Then, when 
he desires to return, return is made possible and easy, but 
the responsibility is forever his. The source of his misery 
is his own will. 

So the disposition of mankind is at the bottom of the 
suffering and the division. There is rebellion and per- 
verseness mingled with the helplessness and ignorance 
and sorrow. No man ever understands or can speak to 
the religious life unless he has the consciousness of this 
inner moral cleft. No man will ever be able to preach with 
power about God unless he does it chiefly in terms of 
God's difference from man and man's perilous estate and 
desperate need of Him. Indeed, God is not like us, not 
like this inner life of ours; this is what we want to hear. 
God is different ; that is why we want to be able to love 
Him. And being thus different, we are separated from 
Him, both by the inner chasm of the divided soul and 
the outer chasm of remote and hostile nature. Then 
comes the final question : How are we, being helpless, to 
reach Him? How are we, being guilty, to find Him? 

When men deal with these queries, with this range of 
experience, this set of inward perceptions, then they are 
preaching religiously. And then, I venture to say, they 
do not fail either of hearers or of followers. Then there 
is what Catherine Booth used to call "liberty of speech" ; 
then there is power because then we talk of realities. 
For what is it that looks out from the eyes of re- 
ligious humanity? Rebellion, pride? no! Humility, loneli- 
ness, something of a just and deserved fear; but most 
of all, desire, insatiable, unwavering, an intense desire. 
This passion of the race, its never satisfied hunger, its 
incredible intensity and persistency of striving and long- 
124 



THE UNMEASURED GULF 

ing, is at once the tragedy and glory, the witness to the 
helplessness, the revelation of the capacity of the race. 
The mainspring of human activity, the creative impulse 
from which in devious ways all the thousand-hued mo- 
tives of our lives arise, is revealed in the ancient cry, 
"My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God!" That 
unquenched thirst for Him underlies all human life, as 
the solemn stillness of the ocean underlies the restless 
upper waves. The dynamic of the world is the sense of 
the divine reality. The woe of the world is man's inabil- 
ity to discover and appropriate that reality. Who that 
has entered truly into life does not perceive beneath all 
the glitter of its brilliance, the roar of its energy and 
achievement, the note of melancholy? The great under- 
tone of life is solemn in its pathetic uniformity. The 
poets and prophets of the world have seized unerringly 
upon that melancholy undertone. Who ever better under- 
stood the futility and helplessness of unaided man, the 
certain doom that tracks down his pride of insolence, or 
his sin, than the Greek tragedians? Sophocles, divided 
spirit that he was, heard that note of melancholy long 
ago by the ^Egean, wrote it into his somber dramas, 
with their turbid ebb and flow of human misery. Some- 
times the voices of our humanity as they rise blend and 
compose into one great cry that is lifted, shivering and 
tingling, to the stars, "Oh, that I knew where I might 
find Him !" Sometimes and more often they sink into 
a subdued and minor plaint, infinitely touching in its hu- 
man solicitude, perplexity and pain. Again, James Ste- 
phens has phrased it for us in his verse The Nodding 
Stars. 1 

1 Songs from the Clay, p. 68. 

125 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

" Brothers, what is it ye mean, 
What is it ye try to say 
That so earnestly ye lean 
From the spirit to the clay. 

" There are weary gulfs between 
Here and sunny Paradise, 
Brothers! What is it ye mean 
That ye search with burning eyes, 

" Down for me whose fire is clogged, 
Clamped in sullen, earthy mould, 
Battened down and fogged and bogged, 
Where the clay is seven-fold." 

Now we understand the tragic aspect of nature and 
of the human soul caught in this cosmic dualism with- 
out which corresponds to the ethical dualism within. 
This perception of the One behind the many in nature, 
of the thing-in-itself, as distinguished from the many ex- 
pressions of that thing, is the chief theme for preaching. 
This is what brings men to themselves. Herein, as Dr. 
Newman Smyth has pointed out, appears the unique 
marvel of personality. "It becomes conscious of itself as 
individual and it individualizes the world ; it is the one 
discovering itself among the many. In the midst of uni- 
formities of nature, moving at will on the plane of nat- 
ural necessities, weaving the pattern of its ideas through 
the warp of natural laws, runs the personal life. On the 
same plane and amid these uniformities, yet itself a 
sphere of being of another order ; in it, yet disentangled 
from it, and having its center in itself, it lives and moves 
and has its being, breaking no thread of nature's weav- 
126 



THE UNMEASURED GULF 

ing, subject to its own law, and manifesting a dynamic 
of its own." 1 

The source, then, as we see it, of all human hopes and 
human dignity, the urge that lies behind all metaphysics 
and much of literature and art, the thing that makes men 
eager to live, yet nobly curious to die, is this conviction 
that One like unto ourselves but from whom we have 
made ourselves unlike, akin to our real, if buried, person, 
walketh with us in the fiery furnace of our life. There 
is a Spirit in man and the breath of the Almighty giveth 
him understanding. Starting from this interpretation, we 
can begin to order the baffling and teasing aspects, the 
illusive nature of the world. Why this ever failing, but 
never ending struggle against unseen odds to grasp and 
understand and live with the Divine? Why, between the 
two, the absolute and the changeless spirit, unseen but 
felt, and the hesitant and timid spirit of a man, would 
there seem to be a great gulf fixed? Because we are 
wrong. Because man finds the gulf within himself. He 
chafes at the limitations of time and space? Yes; but he 
chafes more at the mystery and weakness, the mingled 
deceitfulness and cunning and splendor of the human 
heart. Because there is no one of us who can say, I have 
made my life pure, I am free from my sin. He knows 
that the gulf is there between the fallible and human, 
and the more than human ; he does not know how to 
cross it; he says, 

" I would think until I found 
Something I can never find 
Something lying on the ground 
In the bottom of my mind." 
Here, then, can we not understand that mingling of 
1 The Meaning of the Personal Life, p. 173. 
127 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

mystic dignity and profound humility, of awe-struck 
pride and utter self-abnegation, wherewith the man of re- 
ligion regards his race and himself? He is the child of the 
Eternal ; he, being man, alone knows that God is. "When 
I consider the heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the 
moon and the stars which Thou hast ordained, what is 
man that Thou art mindful of him, or the son of man 
that Thou visitest him?" Here is the humility: "Why 
so hot, little man !" Then comes the awe-struck 
pride: "Yet Thou hast made him a little lower than the 
angels and crowned him with glory and honor." "Alone 
with the gods, alone!" God is the high and lofty one 
which inhabited] eternity, but He is also nigh unto them 
who are of a broken and a contrite heart. 

Here we are come to the very heart of religion. Man's 
proud separateness in the universe ; yet man's moral de- 
fection and his responsibility for it which makes him 
know that separateness; man's shame and helplessness un- 
der it. Over against the denial or evasion of moral values 
by the naturalist and the dullness to the sense of moral 
helplessness by the humanist, there stands the sense of 
moral difference, the sense of sin, of penitence and con- 
fession. No preaching not founded on these things can 
ever be called religious or can ever stir those ranges of 
the human life for which alone preaching is supposed 
to exist. 

What is the religious law, then? It is the law of hu- 
mility. And what is the religious consciousness? The- 
sense of man's difference from nature and from God. 
The sense of his difference from himself within himself 
and the longing for an inner harmony which shall unite 
him with himself and with the beauty and the spirit with- 
out. So what is the religious passion? Is it to exalt human 
128 



THE UNMEASURED GULF 

nature ? It would be more true to say it is to lose it. What 
is the end for us? Not identification with nature and the 
natural self, but pursuit of the other than nature, the 
more than natural self. Our humility is not like that of 
Uriah Heep, a mean opinion of ourselves in comparison 
with other men. It is the profound consciousness of the 
weakness and the nothingness of our kind, and of the 
poor ends human nature sets its heart upon, in compari- 
son with that Other One above and beyond and without 
us, to whom we are kin, from whom we are different, to 
whom we aspire, to reach whom we know not how. 

This, then, is what we mean when we turn back from 
the language of experience to the vocabulary of philoso- 
phy and theology and talk about the absolute values of 
religion. We mean by "absolute values" that behind the 
multifarious and ever changing nature, is a single and a 
steadfast cause — a great rock in a weary land. We have 
lost the old absolute philosophies and dogmatic theolo- 
gies and that is good and right, for they were outworn. 
But we are never going to lose the central experience 
that produced them, and our task is to find a new phi- 
losophy to express these inner things for which the 
words "supernatural," "absolute," are no longer intelligi- 
ble. For we still know that behind man's partial and 
relative knowledge, feeling, willing, is an utter knowledge, 
a perfect feeling, a serene and unswerving will ; that be- 
neath man's moral anarchy there is moral sovereignty; 
that behind his helplessness there is abundant power to 
save. Perhaps this Other is always changing, but, if so, 
it is a Oneness which is changing. In short, the thing that 
is characteristic of religion is that it dwells, not on man's 
likenesses, but on his awful differences from nature 
I and from God ; sees him not as little counterparts of 
129 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 
deity, but as broken fragments only to be made whole 
within the perfect life. It sees relativity as the law of our 
being, yes, but relativity, not of the sort that excludes, 
but is included in. a higher absolute, even as the planet 
swings in infinite space. 

The trouble with much preaching is that it lacks the 
essentially religious insight; in dwelling on man's identi- 
ties it confuses or drugs, not clarifies and purges, the 
spirit. Thus it obsgUlfiS the gulf. Sometimes it evades it, 
M bridges it by minimizing ii. and genuinely religious 
people, and those who want to be religious, and those 
who might be, know that such preaching is not real and 
that it does not move them and, worst of all, the hungry 
sheep look up and are not fed. For in such preaching 
there is n«» call to humility, no plea for grace, no sense 
that the achievement of self-unity is as much a rescue as 
it is a reformation. But this sense of the need of salvation 
is integral to religion; this is where it has parted com- 
pany with humanism. Humanism makes no organic rela- 
tions between man and the Eternal. It is as though it 
thought these would take care of themselves! In the 
place of grace it puts pride ; pride of caste, of family, of 
character, of intellect. But high self-discipline and pride 
in the human spirit are not the deepest or the high- 
est notes man strikes. The cry, not of pride in self, 
but for fellowship with the Infinite, is the superlative ex- 
pression of man. Augustine sounded the highest note of 
feeling when he wrote, "O God, Thou hast made us for 
Thyself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in 
Thee." The words of the Lord Jesus gave the clearest 
insight of the human mind when He said, "And when he 
came to himself, he said, I will arise and go to my Fa-, 
ther." ■ r 

130 



CHAPTER FIVE 
Grace, Knowledge, Virtue 

I HOPE the concluding paragraphs of the last chap- 
ter brought us back into the atmosphere of re- 
ligion, into that sort of mood in which the reality 
of the struggle for character, the craving of the human 
spirit to give and to receive compassion, the cry of the 
lonely soul for the love of God, were made manifest. 
These are the real goods of life to religious natures ; they 
need this meat which the world knoweth not of ; there 
is a continuing resolve in them to say, "Good-by, proud 
world, I'm going home!" The genuinely religious man 
must, and should indeed, live in this world, but he can- 
not live of it. 

Merely to create such an atmosphere then, to induce 
this sort of mood, to shift for men their perspectives, 
until these needs and values rise once more compelling 
before their eyes, is a chief end of preaching. Its object 
is not so much moralizing or instructing as it is in- 
terpreting and revealing ; not the plotting out of the land- 
scape at our feet, but the lifting of our eyes to the hills, 
to the fixed stars. Then we really do see things that are 
large as large and things that are small as small. We need 
that vision today from religious leaders more than we 
need any other one thing. 

For humanism and naturalism between them have 
brought us to an almost complete secularization of 

131 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

preaching, in which its characteristic elements, its dis- 
tinctive contribution, have largely faded from liberal 
speaking and from the consciousness of its hearers. We 
have emphasized man's kinship with nature until now we 
can see him again declining to the brute ; we have pro- 
claimed the divine Immanence until we think to compass 
the Eternal within a facile and finite comprehension. By 
thus dwelling on the physical and rational elements of 
human experience, religion has come to concern itself to 
an extraordinary degree with the local and temporal 
reaches of faith. We have lost the sense of communion 
with Absolute Being and of the obligation to standards 
higher than those of the world, which that communion 
brings Out of this identification of man with nature has 
come the preaching which ignores the fact of sin; which 
reduces free will and the moral responsibility of the in- 
dividual to the vanishing point ; which stresses the con- 
trol of the forces of inheritance and environment to the 
edge of fatalistic determinism ; which leads man to re- 
gard himself as unfortunate rather than reprehensible 
when moral disaster overtakes him ; which induces that 
condoning of the moral rebel which is born not of love 
for the sinner but of indifference to his sin ; which issues 
in that last degeneration of self-pity in which individuals 
and societies alike indulge; and in that repellent senti- 
mentality over vice and crime which beflowers the mur- 
derer while it forgets its victim, which turns to ouija 
boards and levitated tables to obscure the solemn finality 
of death and to gloze over the guilty secrets of the bat- 
tlefield. . 

Thus it has come about that we preach of God in terms 
of the drawing-room, as though he were some vast St. 
Nicholas, sitting up there in the sky or amiably mform- 
132 



GRACE, KNOWLEDGE, VIRTUE 

ing our present world, regarding with easy benevolence 
His minute and multifarious creations, winking at our 
pride, our cruelty, our self-love, our lust, not greatly car- 
ing if we break His laws, tossing out His indiscriminate 
gifts, and vaguely trusting in our automatic arrival at 
virtue. Even as in philosophy, it is psychologists, experts 
in empirical science and methods, and sociologists, ex- 
perts in practical ethics, who may be found, while the 
historian and the metaphysician are increasingly rare, so 
in preaching we are amiable and pious and ethical and 
practical and informative, but the vision and the ab- 
solutism of religion are a departing glory. 

What complicates the danger and difficulty of such a 
position, with its confusion of natural and human values, 
and its rationalizing and secularizing of theistic think- 
ing, is that it has its measure of reality. All these 
observations of naturalist and humanist are half 
truths, and for that very reason more perilous than utter 
falsehoods. For the mind tends to rest contented 
within their areas, and so the partial becomes the worst 
enemy of the whole. What we have been doing - is stress- 
ing the indubitable identity between man and nature and 
between the Creator and His creatures to the point of 
unreality, forgetting the equally important fact of 
the difference, the distinction between the two. But sound 
knowledge and normal feeling rest upon observing and 
reckoning with both aspects of this law of kinship and 
contrast. All human experience becomes known to 
us through the interplay of what appear to be contra- 
dictory needs and opposing truths within our being. Thus, 
man is a social animal and can only find himself in a series 
of relationships as producer, lover, husband, father and 
friend. He is a part of and like unto his kind, his spirit 

*3>3 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

immanent in his race. But man is also a solitary creature, 
and in that very solitariness, which he knows as he con- 
trasts it with his social interests, he finds identity of self, 
the something which makes us "us," which separates us 
from all others in the world. A Crusoe, marooned on a 
South Sea island, without even a black man Friday for 
companionship, would soon cease to be a man ; personal- 
ity would forsake him. But the same Crusoe is equally 
in need of solitude. The hell of the barracks, no matter 
how well conducted, is their hideous lack of privacy ; 
men condemned by shipwreck or imprisonment to an un- 
broken and intimate companionship kill their comrade or 
themselves. We are all alike and hence gregarious; we 
are all different and hence flee as a bird to the mountain. 
The reality of human personality lies in neither one as- 
pect of the truth nor the other, but in both. The truth is 
found as we hold the balance between identity and dif- 
ference. Hence we are not able to think of personality in 
the Godhead unless we conceive of God as being, within 
Himself, a social no less than a solitary Being. 

Again, this law that the truth is found in the balance 
of the antinomies appears in man's equal passion for con- 
tinuity and permanency and for variety and change. The 
book of Revelation tells us that the redeemed, before the 
great white throne, standing upon the sea of glass, sing 
the song of Moses and the Lamb. What has the one to 
do with the other? Here is the savage, triumphant chant 
of the far dawn of Israel's history, joined with the fur- 
thest and latest possible events and words. Well, it 
at least suggests the continuity of the ageless struggle of 
mankind, showing that the past has its place in the pres- 
ent, relieving man's horror of the impermanence, the dis- 
jointed character of existence. He wants something or- 

134 



GRACE, KNOWLEDGE, VIRTUE 

derly and static. But, like the jet of water in the fountain, 
his life is forever collapsing and collapsing, falling in 
upon itself, its apparent permanence nothing but a rapid 
and glittering succession of impermanences. The dread 
of growing old is chiefly that, as years come on, life 
changes more and faster, becomes a continual process of 
readjustment. Therefore we want something fixed; like 
the sailor with his compass, we must have some needle, 
even if a tremulous one, always pointing toward a 
changeless star. Yet this is but one half of the picture. 
Does man desire continuity? — quite as much does he wish 
for variety, cessation of old ways, change and fresh be- 
ginnings. The most terrible figure which the subtle im- 
agination of the Middle Ages conjured up was that of the 
Wandering Jew, the man who could not die ! Here, then, 
we arrive at knowledge, the genuine values of experi- 
ence, by this same balancing of opposites. Continuity 
alone kills ; perpetual change strips life of significance ; 
man must have both. 

Now, it is in the religious field that this interests us 
most. We have seen that what we have been doing there 
of late has been to ignore the fact that reality is 
found only through this balancing of the law of differ- 
ence and identity, contrast and likeness. We have been 
absorbed in one half of reality, identifying man with na- 
ture, prating of his self-sufficiency, seeing divinity almost 
exclusively as immanent in the phenomenal world. Thus 
we have not merely been dealing with only one half of the 
truth, but that, to use a solecism, the lesser half. 

For doubtless men do desire in religion a recognition 
of the real values of their physical nature. And they want 
rules of conduct, a guide for practical affairs, a scale of 
values for this world. This satisfies the craving for tem- 

135 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

poral adjustment, the sense of the goodness and worth of 
what our instinct transmits to us. But it does nothing to 
meet that profound dissatisfaction with this world and 
that sense of the encumbrances of the flesh which is also 
a part of reality and, to the religious man, perhaps the 
greater part. He wants to turn away from all these pres- 
ent things and be kept secretly in a pavilion from the 
strife of tongues. Here he has no continuing city. Al- 
ways while we dwell here we have a dim and restless 
sense that we are in an unreal country and we know, in 
our still moments, that we shall only come to ourselves 
when we return to the house of our Father. Hence men 
have never been satisfied with religious leaders who 
chiefly interpreted this world to them. 

And indeed, since July. L914, and down to and includ- 
ing this very hour, this idealizing of time, which we had 
almost accepted as our office, has had a ghastly exposure. 
Because there has come upon us all one of these irrevoca- 
ble and irremediable disasters, for which time has no 
word of hope, to which Nature is totally indifferent, for 
which the God of the outgoings and incomings of the 
morning is too small. For millions of living and suffer- 
ing men and women all temporal and mortal values have 
been wiped out. They have been caught in a catas- 
trophe so ruthless and dreadful that it has strewed their 
bodies in heaps over the fields and valleys of many na- 
tions. Today central and south and northeastern Europe 
and western Asia are filled with idle and hungry and 
desperate men and women. They have been deprived of 
peace, of security, of bread, of enlightenment alike. Some- 
thing more than temporal salvation and human words of 
hope are needed here. Something more than ethical re- 
form and social readjustment and economic alleviation, 
136 



GRACE, KNOWLEDGE, VIRTUE 

admirable though these are! Something there must be in 
human nature that eclipses human nature, if it is to en- 
dure so much! What has the God of this world to give 
for youth, deprived of their physical immortality and all 
their sweet and inalienable human rights, who are lying 
now beneath the acre upon acre of tottering wooden 
crosses in their soldier's graves? Is there anything in this 
world sufficient now for the widow, the orphan, the crip- 
ple, the starving, the disillusioned and the desperate? 
What Europe wants to know is why and for what pur- 
pose this holocaust — is there anything beyond, was there 
anything before it? A civilization dedicated to speed and 
power and utility and mere intelligence cannot answer 
these questions. Neither can a religion resolved into 
■ naught but the ethics of Jesus answer them. "If in this 
world only," cries today the voice of our humanity, "we 
have hope, then we are of all men the most miserable!" 
When one sees our American society of this moment re- 
turning so easily to the physical and the obvious and the 
practical things of life; when one sees the church im- 
mersed in programs, and moralizing, and hospitals, and 
campaigns, and membership drives, and statistics, and 
money getting, one is constrained to ask, "What shall be 
said of the human spirit that it can forget so soon?" 

Is it not obvious, then, that our task for a pagan soci- 
ety and a self-contained humanity is to restore the bal- 
ance of the religious consciousness and to dwell, not on 
man's identity with Nature, but on his far-flung differ- 
ence; not on his self-sufficiency, but on his tragic help- 
lessness; not on the God of the market place, the office 
and the street, an immanent and relative deity, but on the 
Absolute, that high and lofty One who inhabiteth eter- 
nity ? Indeed, we are being solemnly reminded today that 

137 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 
the other-worldliness of religion, its concern with future, 
supertemporal things, is its characteristic and most pre- 
cious contribution to the world. We are seeing how every 
human problem when pressed to its ultimate issue be- 
comes theological. Here is where the fertile field for con- 
temporary preaching lies. It is found, not in remaining 
with those dements in the religious consciousness which 
it shares in common with naturalism and humanism, but 
in passing over to those which are distinctive to itself 
alone. It has always been true, but it is especially true at 
this moment, that effective preaching has to do chiefly 
with transcendent values. 

Our task is to assert, first, then, the "otherness" of 
man, his difference from Nature, to point out the illusori- 
ness of her phenomena for him, the derived reality and 
secondary value of her facts. These are things that need 
religious elucidation. The phrase "other-worldliness" has 
come, not without reason, to have an evil connotation 
among us, but there is nevertheless a genuine disdain of 
this world, a sense of high superiority to it and profound 
indifference toward it, which is of the essence of the 
religious attitude. He who knows that here he is a 
stranger, sojourning in tabernacles; that he belongs by 
his nature, not to this world, but that he seeks a better, 
that is to say. a heavenly country, will for the joy that is 
set before him, endure a cross and will despise the shame. 
He will have a conscious superiority to hostile facts of 
whatever sort or magnitude, for he knows that they de- 
ceive in so far as they pretend to finality. When religion 
has thus acquired a clear-sighted and thoroughgoing in- 
difference to the natural order, then, and then only, it be- 
gins to be potent within that order. Then, as Professor 

138 



GRACE, KNOWLEDGE, VIRTUE 

Hocking says, it rises superior to the world of facts and 
becomes irresistible. 1 

The time is ripe, then, first, for the preacher to empha- 
size the inward and essential difference between man and 
nature which exists under the outward likeness, to re- 
mind him of this more-than-nature, this "otherness" of 
man, without which he would lose his most precious pos- 
session, the sense of personality. Faith begins by recog- 
nizing this transcendent element in man and the accept- 
ance of it is the foundation of religious preaching. What 
was the worst thing about the war? Not its destruction 
nor its horrors nor its futilities, but its shames ; the 
dreadful indignities which it inflicted upon man; it 
treated men as though they were not souls ! No such 
moral catastrophe could have overwhelmed us if we had 
not for long let the brute lie too near the values and 
practices of our lives, depersonalizing thus, in politics 
and industry and morals and religion, our civilization. It 
all proceeded from the irreligious interpretation of hu- 
man existence, and the fruits of that interpretation are 
before us. 

The first task of the preacher, then, is to combat the ^ JLs 
naturalistic interpretation of humanity with every insight 
and every conviction that is within his power. If we are 
to restore religious values, rebuild a world of transcend- 
ent ends and more-than-natural beauty, we must begin 
here with man. In the popular understanding of the 
phrase all life is not essentially one in kind ; physi- 
cal self-preservation and reproduction are not the be-all 
and the end-all of existence. There is something more to 
be expressed in man without which these are but dust and 
ashes in the mouth. There is another kind of life mixed in 

1 The Meaning of God in Human Experience, p. 518. 
139 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

with this, the obvious. If we cannot express the other 
world, we shall not long tolerate this one. To think that 
this world is all, leans toward madness; such a picture of 
man is a travesty, not a portrait of his nature. Only on 
some such basic truths as these can we build character 
in our young people. Paganism tells them that it is 
neither natural nor possible to keep themselves unspotted 
from the world. Over against it we must reiterate, You 
can and you must ! for the man that sinneth wrongeth his 
own soul. You are something more than physical hunger 
and reproductive instinct ; you are of spirit no less than 
dust. How, then, can you do this great sin against God ! 

How abundant here arc the data with which religious 
preaching may deal. Indeed, as Huxley and scores of 
others have pointed out, it is only the religious view of 
man that builds up civilization. A great community is the 
record of man's supernaturalism, his uniqueness. It is 
built on the "higher-than-self" principle which is in- 
volved in the moral sense itself. And this higher-than- 
self is not just a collective naturalism, a social conscious- 
ness, as Durkheim and Overstreet and Miss Harrison 
would say. The simplest introspective act will prove that. 
For a man cannot ignore self-condemnation as if it were 
only a natural difficulty, nor disparage it as though it were 
merely humanly imposed. We think it comes from that 
which is above and without, because it speaks to the soli- 
tary and the unique, not the social and the common part 
of us. Hence conscience is not chiefly a tribal product, 
for it is what separates us from the group and in our 
isolation unites us with something other than the group. 
"Against Thee, Thee only, have I sinned and done this 
evil in Thy sight." So religious preaching perpetually 
140 



GRACE, KNOWLEDGE, VIRTUE 

holds us up above our natural selves and the natural 
order. 

Thus man must live by an other-than-natural law if 
he is to preserve the family, which is the social unit of 
civilization. Its very existence depends upon modifying 
and transforming natural hunger by a diviner instinct, by 
making voluntary repressions, willing sacrifices of the 
lower to the higher, the subordinating of the law of self 
and might to the law of sacrifice and love — this is what 
preserves family life. Animals indeed rear and cherish 
their young and for the mating season remain true to one 
another, but no animality per se ever yet built a home. 
There must be a more-than-natural law in the state. Our 
national life and honor rest upon the stability of the 
democracy and we can only maintain that by walking a 
very straight and narrow path. For the peace of freedom 
as distinguished from precarious license is a more-than- 
natural attainment, born of self-repression and social dis- 
cipline, the voluntary relinquishment of lesser rights for 
higher rights, of personal privileges for the sake of the 
common good. Government by the broad and easy path, 
following the lines of least resistance, like the natural or- 
der, saying might is right, means either tyranny or an- 
archy. Circumspice! One of the glories of western civili- 
zation is its hospitals. They stand for the supernatural 
doctrine of the survival of the unfit, the conviction of the 
community that, to take the easy path of casting out the 
aged and infirm, the sick and the suffering, would mean 
incalculable degeneration of national character, and that 
the difficult and costly path of protection and minister- 
ing service is both necessary and right. And why is the 
reformatory replacing the prison? Because we have 
learned that the obvious, natural way of dealing with the 
141 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

criminal certainly destroys him and threatens to destroy 
us; and that the hard, difficult path of reeducating and 
reforming a vicious life is the one which the state for her 
own safety must follow. 

Genuine preaching, then, first of all, calls men to re- 
pentance, bids them turn away from their natural selves, 
and, to find that other and realer self, enter the straight 
and narrow gate. The call is not an arbitrary command, 
born of a negative and repressive spirit. It is a profound 
exhortation based upon a fundamental law of human 
progress, having behind it the inviolable sanction of the 
truth. Such preaching would have the authentic note. It 
is self-verifying. It stirs to answer that quality — both 
moral and imaginative — in the spirit of man which 
craves the pain and difficulty and satisfaction of separa- 
tion from the natural order. It appeals to a timeless 
worth in man which transcends any values of mere in- 
telligence which vary with the ages, or any material pros- 
perity which perishes with the using, or any volitional ac- 
tivity that dies in its own expenditure. Much of the phi- 
losophy of Socrates was long ago outmoded, but Socrates 
himself, as depicted in the Phaedo, confronting death 
with the cup of hemlock in his hand, saying with a smile, 
"There is no evil which can happen to a good man liv- 
ing or dead," has a more-than-natural, an enduring and 
transcendent quality. Whenever we preach to the ele- 
ment in mankind which produces such attitudes toward 
life and bid it assert itself, then we are doing religious 
preaching, and then we speak with power. Jesus lived 
within the inexorable circle of the ideas of His time ; He 
staked much on the coming of the new kingdom which 
did not appear either when or as He had first expected 
it. He had to adjust, as do we all, His life to His experi- 
142 



GRACE, KNOWLEDGE, VIRTUE 

ence, His destiny to His fate. But when He was hanging 
on His cross, forgotten of men and apparently deserted 
by His God, something in Him that had nothing to do 
with nature or the brute rose to a final expression and 
by its more-than-natural reality, sealed and authenticated 
His life. Looking down upon His torturers, understanding 
them far better than they understood themselves, He cried, 
"Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." 
That cry has no place in nature ; it has no application and 
no meaning outside the human heart and that which is 
above, not beneath, the human heart, from which it is de- 
rived. There, then, again was the supernatural law ; there 
was the more-than-nature in man which makes nature 
into human nature; and there is the thing to whose 
discovery, cultivation, expression, real preaching is 
addressed. Every time a man truly preaches he so por- 
trays what men ought to be, must be, and can be if they 
will, that they know there is something here 

"that leaps life's narrow bars 
To claim its birthright with the hosts of heaven! 

A seed of sunshine that doth leaven 
Our earthly dullness with the beams of stars, 

And glorify our clay 
With light from fountains elder than the Day." 1 

Such preaching is a perpetual refutation of and rebuke 
to the naturalism and imperialism of our present so- 
ciety. It is the call to the absolute in man, to a clear issue 
with evil. It would not cry peace, peace, when there is no 
peace. It would be living and active, and sharper than any 
two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing of both 

1 J. R. Lowell, Commemoration Ode, stanza IV, 11. 30-35. 
143 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

joints and marrow, quick to discern the thoughts and in- 
tents of the heart. 

Following this insistence upon the difference from na- 
ture, the more-than-natural in man, the second thing in 
religious preaching will have to be, obviously, the mes- 
sage of salvation. That is to say, reducing the statement 
to its lowest terms, if man is to live by such a law, the 
law of more-than-nature, then he must have something 
also more-than-human to help him in his task. He will 
need strength from outside. Indeed, because religion de- 
clares that there is such divine assistance, and that faith 
can command it. is the chief cause and reason for our 
existence. When we cease to preach salvation in some 
form or other, we deny our own selves ; we efface our 
own existence. For no one can preach the more-than-hu- 
man in mankind without emphasizing those elements of 
free will, moral responsibility, the need and capacity for 
struggle and holiness in human life which it indicates, 
and which in every age have been a part of the message 
of Him who said, "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your 
Father, which is in heaven, is perfect." 

Therefore, as we have previously corrected the half 
truth of the naturalist who makes a caricature, not a 
portrait of man, we must now in the same way turn to 
the correcting of the humanist's emphasis upon man's 
native capacity and insist upon the complementary truth 
which fulfills this moral heroism of mankind, namely, the 
divine rescue which answers to its inadequacy. Man must 
struggle for his victory ; he can win ; he cannot win alone. 
We must then insist upon the doctrine of salvation, turn- 
ing ourselves to the other side of the humanist's picture. 
Man cannot live by this more-than-natural law unaided. 
For not only has he the power to rise above Nature ; the 
144 



GRACE, KNOWLEDGE, VIRTUE 

same thing gives him equal capacity to sink beneath her, 
and, when left to himself, he generally does so. The 
preacher does not dare deny the sovereignty of sin. Hu- 
manism hates the very name of sin; it has never made any 
serious attempt to explain the consciousness of guilt. 
Neither naturalist nor humanist can afford to admit sin, 
for sin takes man, as holiness does, outside the iron chain 
of cause and effect ; it breaks the law ; it is not strictly nat- 
ural. It makes clear enough that man is outside the nat- 
ural order in two ways. He is both inferior and superior 
to it. He falls beneath, he rises above it. When he acts 
like a beast, he is not clean and beastly, but unclean and 
bestial. When he lifts his head in moral anguish, bathes 
all his spirit in the flood of awe and repentance, is trans- 
figured with the glorious madness of self-sacrifice, he is 
so many worlds higher than the beast that their rela- 
tionship becomes irrelevant. So we must deal more com- 
pletely than humanists do with the central mystery of 
our experience ; man's impotent idealism, his insight not 
matched with consummation ; the fact that what he dares 
to dream of he is not able alone to do. 

For the humanist exalts man, which is good ; but then 
he makes him self-sufficient for the struggle which such 
exaltation demands, which is bad. In that partial under- 
standing he departs from truth. And what is it that makes 
the futility of so much present preaching? It is the ac- 
ceptance of this doctrine of man's moral adequacy and 
consequently the almost total lack either of the assurance 
of grace or of the appeal to the will. No wonder such 
exhortations cannot stem the tide of an ever increasing 
worldliness. Such preaching stimulates the mind; in both 
the better and the worse preachers, it moves the emo- 
tions ; but it gives men little power to act on what they 

145 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

hear and feel to the transformation of their daily exist- 
ence. Thus the humanistic sense of man's sufficiency, 
coupled with the inherent distrust of any notion of help 
from beyond and above, any belief in a reinforcing power 
which a critical rationalism cannot dissect and explain, 
has gradually ruled out of court the doctrine of salvation 
until the preacher's power, both to experience and to 
transmit it. has atrophied through disuse. 

Who can doubt that one large reason why crude and 
indefensible concepts of the Christian faith have such a 
disconcerting vitality today is because they carry, in their 
ou tm.»ded. unethical, discredited forms, the truth of 
man's insufficiency in himself and the confident assur- 
ance of that something coming from without which will 
abundantly complete the struggling life within? They 
offer the assurance of that peace and moral victory which 
manso ardently desires, because they declare that it is both 
a discovery and a revelation, an achievement and a rescue. 
There are vigorous and rapidly growing popular move- 
ments of tlie day which rest their summation of faith on 
the quadrilateral of an inerrant and verbally inspired 
Scripture, the full deity of Jesus Christ, the efficacy of 
His substitutionary atonement, the speedy second coming 
of the Lord. Xo sane person can suppose that these cults 
succeed because of the ethical insight, the spiritual sen- 
sitiveness, the intellectual integrity of such a message. It 
does not possess these things. They succeed, in spite of 
their obscurantism, because they do confess and meet 
man's central need, his need to be saved. The power of 
that fact is what is able to carry so narrow and so in- 
defensible a doctrine. 

So the second problem of the preacher is clear. Man 

asserts his potential independence of the natural law. 

146 * 



GRACE, KNOWLEDGE, VIRTUE 

But to realize that, he must bridge the gulf between him- 
self and the supernatural lawgiver to whose dictates he 
confesses he is subject. He is not free from the bondage 
of the lower, except through the bondage to the higher. 
Nor can he live by that higher law unaided and alone. 
Here we strike at the root of humanism. Its kindly tol- 
erance of the church is built up on the proud conviction 
that we, with our distinctive doctrine of salvation, are 
superfluous, hence sometimes disingenuous and always 
negligible. The humanist believes that understanding 
takes the place of faith. What men need is not to be re- 
deemed from their sins, but to be educated out of their 
follies. 

But does right knowing in itself suffice to insure right 
doing? Socrates and Plato, with their indentifica- 
tion of knowledge and virtue, would appear to think so ; 
the church has gone a long way, under humanistic pres- 
sure, in tacit acquiescence with their doctrine. Yet most 
of us, judging alike from internal and personal evidence 
and from external and social observation, would say that 
there was no sadder or more universal experience than 
that of the failure of right knowledge to secure right per- 
formance. Right knowledge is not in itself right living. 
We have striking testimony on that point from one of 
the greatest of all humanists, no less a person than Con- 
fucius. "At seventy," he says, "I could follow what my 
heart desired without transgressing the law of meas- 
ure." 1 The implication of such testimony makes no very 
good humanistic apologetic ! Most of us, when desire has 
failed, can manage to attain, unaided, the identification 
of understanding and conduct, can climb to the poor 
heights of a worn-out and withered continence. But one 

1 Analects, II, civ. 

147 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

wonders a little whether, then, the climbing seems to be 
worth while. 

Bui the doctrine usually begins by minimizing the free 
agency of the individual, playing up the factors of com- 
pulsion, either of circumstance or inheritance or of ig- 
norance, as being in themselves chiefly responsible for 
blameful acts. These are therefore considered involun- 
tary and certain to be reformed when man knows better 
and has the corresponding strength of his knowledge. 
But Aristotle, who deals with this Socratic doctrine in the 
third book of the Ethics, very sensibly remarks, "It is 
ridiculous to lay the blame of our wrong actions upon ex- 
ternal causes rather than Upon the facility with which we 
ourselves are caught by such causes, and, while we take 
credit for our noble actions to ourselves, lay the blame 
of our shameful actions upon pleasure." 1 "The facility 
with which we are caught" — there is the religious under- 
standing ; there is that perversion of will which conspires 
with the perils and chances of the world so that together 
they may undo the soul. 

Of course, as Aristotle admits, there is this half truth 
lying at the root of the Socratic identification of virtue 
and knowledge that every vicious person is ignorant of 
what he ought to do and what he ought to abstain from 
doing in the sense that what he is about to do could not 
be defended upon any ground of enlightened self-in- 
terest. And so, while he finds sin sweet and evil pleasant, 
these are delusive experiences, which, if he saw life 
steadily and whole, he would know as such. But one 
reason for this ignorance is unwillingness to know. Good 
men do evil, and understanding men sin, partly because 
they are misled by false ideas, partly, also, because, know- 

1 Ethics, Book III, ch. ii, p. 61. 
148 



GRACE, KNOWLEDGE, VIRTUE 

ing them false, they cannot or will not give them up. This 
is what Goethe very well understood when he said, "Most 
men prefer error to truth, because truth imposes limita- 
tions and error does not." 

And another reason is that when men do know, they 
find a deadly and mysterious, a sort of perverted joy — a 
sweet and terrible and secret delight, — in denying their 
own understanding. Thus right living calls for a repeated 
and difficult exercise of the will, what Professor Babbitt 
calls "a pulling back of the impulse to the track that 
knowledge indicates." Such moral mastery is not identi- 
cal with moral perception and most frequently is not its 
accompaniment, unless observation and experience are 
alike fallacious. Thus the whole argument falls to the 
ground when we confess that possession of knowledge 
does not guarantee the application of it. Therefore the 
two things, knowledge and virtue, according to universal 
experience, are not identical. Humanists indeed use the 
word "knowledge" for the most part in an esoteric sense. 
Knowledge is virtue in the sense that it enables us to see 
virtue as excellent and desirable; it is not virtue in the 
sense that it alone enables us to acquire it. 

Who, indeed, that has ever lived in the far country 
does not know that one factor in its fascination was a 
bittersweet awareness of the folly, the inevitable disaster, 
of such alien surroundings. Who also does not know that 
often when the whole will is set to identify conduct with 
conviction, it may be, for all its passionate and bitter sin- 
cerity, set in vain. In every hour of every day there are 
hundreds of lives that battle honestly, but with decreas- 
ing spiritual forces, with passion and temptation. Some- 
times a life is driven by the fierce gales of enticement, 
the swift currents of desire, right upon the jagged rock 
149 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

of some great sin. Lives that have seemed strong and 
fair go down every day, do they not. and shock ns for a 
moment with their irremediable catastrophe? And we 
must not forget that before they went down, for many a 
month or even year they have been hard beset lives. Be- 
fore that final and complete ruin, they have been drift- 
ing and struggling, driven and fighting, sin drawing 
nearer and nearer, their fated lives urged on, the mind 
growing darker, the stars in their souls going out, the 
Steering of their own lives taken from their hands. Then 
there has been the sense of the coming danger, the dark 
presentiment of how it all must end when the "powers 
that tend the soul to help it from the death that cannot die, 
and save it even in extremes, begin to vex and plague it." 
There lias been the dreadful sense of life drifting toward 
a great crash, nearer and nearer to what must be the 
wreck of all things. What does the humanist have to offer 
to these men and women who know perfectly well where 
they are. and what they are about, and where they would 
like to be, but who can't get there and who are, today and 
every day, putting forth their last and somber efforts, 
trying in vain to just keep clear of ruin until the dark- 
ness and the helplessness shall lift and something or 
someone shall give them peace ! 

Now, it is this defect in the will which automatically 
limits the power of the intellect. It is this which the So- 
cratic identification ignores. So while we might readily 
grant that it is in the essential nature of things that vir- 
tue and truth, wisdom and character, understanding and 
goodness, are but two aspects of one thing, is it not tri- 
fling with one of the most serious facts of human des- 
tiny to interpret the truism to mean that, when a man 
knows that a contemplated act is wrong or foolish or 
150 



GRACE, KNOWLEDGE, VIRTUE 

ugly, he is thereby restrained from accomplishing it? 
Knowledge is not virtue in the sense that mere reason 
or mere perception can control the will. And this is the 
conclusion that Aristotle also comes to when he says : 
"Some people say that incontinence is impossible, if one 
has knowledge. It seems to them strange, as it did to 
Socrates, that where knowledge exists in man, something 
else should master it and drag it about like a slave. Soc- 
rates was wholly opposed to this idea; he denied the ex- 
istence of incontinence, arguing that nobody with a con- 
ception of what was best could act against it, and 
therefore, if he did so act, his action must be due to ig- 
norance." And then Aristotle adds, "The theory is evi- 
dently at variance with the facts of experience." 1 Plato 
himself exposes the theoretical nature of the assertion, 
its inhuman demand upon the will, the superreasonable- 
ness which it expects but offers no way of obtaining, 
when he says, "Every one will admit that a nature hav- 
ing in perfection all the qualities which are required in 
a philosopher is a rare plant seldom seen among men." 2 

It would be well if those people who are going about 
the world today teaching social hygiene to adolescents 
(on the whole an admirable thing to do) but proceeding 
on the assumption that when youth knows what is right 
and what is wrong, and why it is right and why it is 
wrong, and what are the consequences of right and 
wrong, that then, ipso facto, youth will become chaste, — 
well if they would acquaint themselves either with the 
ethics of Aristotle or with the Christian doctrine of sal- 
vation. For if men think that knowledge by itself ever 
yet produced virtue in eager and unsated lives, they are 

1 Ethics, Book VII, ch. iii, pp. 206-207. 

2 Republic, VI, 491. 

151 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

either knaves or fools. They will find that knowledge un- 
controlled by a purified spirit and a reinforced will is 
already teaching men not how to be good, but how to sin 
the more boldly with the better chance of physical im- 
punity. "Philosophy," says Black, "is a feeble antagonist 
before passion, because it does not supply an adequate 
motive for the conflict." 1 There were few men in the 
nineteenth century in whom knowledge and virtue were 
more profoundly and completely joined than in John 
Henry Newman. But did that subtle intellect suffice? 
could it make the scholar into the saint? Hear his own 
words : 

" O Holy Lord, who with the children three 
Didst walk the piercing flame ; 
Help, in those trial hours which, save to Thee, 

I dare not name ; 
Nor let these quivering eyes and sickening heart 
Crumble to dust beneath the tempter's dart. 

" Thou who didst once Thy life from Mary's breast 

Renew from day to day ; 
O might her smile, severely sweet, but rest 

On this frail clay! 
Till I am Thine with my whole soul, and fear 

Not feel, a secret joy, that Hell is near." 

So, only when we include in the term "knowledge" under- 
standing plus good will, is the humanist position true, and 
this, I suppose, is what Aristotle meant when he finally 
says, "Vice is consistent with knowledge of some kind, 
but it excludes knowledge in the full and proper sense of 
the word." 2 

1 Culture and Restraint, p. 104. 

2 Ethics, Book VII, ch. v, p. 215. 

152 



GRACE, KNOWLEDGE, VIRTUE 

Now, so finespun a discussion of intricate and psy- 
chological subtleties is mildly interesting presumably to 
middle-aged scholars, but I submit that a half truth that 
needs so much explanation and so many admissions be- 
fore it can be made safe or actual, is a rather dangerous 
thing to offer to adolescence or to a congregation of av- 
erage men and women. It cannot sound to them very 
much like the good news of Jesus. Culture is a precious 
thing, but no culture, without the help of divine grace 
and the responsive affection on our part which that grace 
induces, will ever knit men together in a kingdom of 
God, a spiritual society. As long ago as the second cen- 
tury Celsus understood that. He says in his polemic 
against Christianity, as quoted by Origen, "If any one 
suppose that it is possible that the people of Asia and 
Europe and Africa, Greeks and barbarians, should agree 
to follow one law, he is hopelessly ignorant." 1 Now, Cel- 
sus was proceeding on the assumption that Christianity 
was only another philosophy, a new intellectual system, 
and he was merely exposing the futility of all such un- 
aided intellectualism. 

It is, therefore, of prime importance for the preacher 
to remember that humanism, or any other doctrine which 
approaches the problem of life and conduct other than by 
moral and spiritual means, can never take the place of 
the religious appeal, because it does not touch the springs 
of action where motives are born and from which con- 
victions arise. You do not make a man moral by enlight- 
ening him ; it is nearer the truth to say that you enlighten 
him when you make him moral. "Blessed are the pure 
in heart," said Jesus, "for they shall see God. If any man 
wills to do the will, he shall know the doctrine." Educa- 

1 Origen, contra Celsum, VIII, p. 72. 
153 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

tion does not wipe out crime nor an understanding mind 
make a holy will. The last half of the nineteenth century 
made it terribly clear that the learning and science of man- 
kind, where they are divorced from piety, unconseerated 
by a spiritual passion, and largely directed by selfish mo- 
tive-, can neither benefit nor redeem the race. Consider 
for a moment the enormous expansion of knowledge 
which the world has witnessed since the year 1859. What 
prodigious accessions to the sum of our common under- 
standing have we seen in the natural and the humane 
sciences; and what marvelous uses of scientific knowl- 
edge for practical purposes have we discovered! We 
have mastered in these latter days a thousand secrets of 
nature. We have freed the mind from old ignorance and 
ancient superstition. We have penetrated the secrets of 
the body, and can almost conquer death and indefinitely 
prolong the span of human days. We face the facts and 
know the world as our fathers could never do. We un- 
derstand the past and foresee the future. But the most 
significant thing about our present situation is this: how 
little has this wisdom, in and of itself, done for us! It 
has made men more cunning rather than more noble. Still 
the body is ravaged and consumed by passion. Still men 
toil for others against their will, and the strong spill the 
blood of the weak for their ambition and the sweat of the 
children for their greed. Never was learning so diffused 
nor the content of scholarship so large as now. Yet the 
great cities are as Babylon and Rome of old, where hu- 
man wreckage multiplies, and hideous vices flourish, and 
men toil without expectancy, and live without hope, and 
millions exist — not live at all — from hand to mouth. As 
we survey the universal unrest of the world today and 
see the horrors of war between nation and nation, and 

154 



GRACE, KNOWLEDGE, VIRTUE 

between class and class, it would not be difficult to make 
out a case for the thesis that the scientific and intellectual 
advances of the nineteenth century have largely worked 
to make men keener and more capacious in their suffer- 
ing. And at least this is true; just so far as the achieve- 
ment of the mind has been divorced from the consecra- 
tion of the spirit, in just so far knowledge has had no 
beneficent potency for the human race. 

Is it not clear, then, that preaching must deal again, 
never more indeed than now, with the religion which 
offers a redemption from sin? This is still foolishness to 
the Greeks, but to those who believe it is still the power 
of God unto salvation. Culture is not religion. When the 
preacher substitutes the one for the other, he gives stones 
for bread, and the hungry sheep go elsewhere or are not 
fed. It is this emasculated preaching, mulcted of its spirit- 
ual forces, which awakes the bitterest distrust and deep- 
est indignation that human beings know. They are fight- 
ing the foes of the flesh and the enemies of the spirit, 
enduring the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, 
standing by the open graves of their friends and kindred, 
saying there, "I shall go to him, but he shall not return to 
me." And then, with all this mystery and oppression of 
life upon them they enter the doors of the house of God 
and listen to a polite essay, are told of the consolations of 
art, reminded of the stupidity of evil, assured of the un- 
reality of sin, offered the subtle satisfactions of a culti- 
vated intelligence. In just so far as they are genuine men 
and women, they resent such preaching as an insult, a 
mockery and an offense. No, no ; something more is 
needed than the humanist can offer for those who are 
hard-pressed participants in the stricken fields of life. 

Religious preaching, then, begins with these two 

155 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

things: man's solitary place in nature, man's inability to 
hold that place alone. Hence two more things are neces- 
sary as essentials of great preaching in a pagan day. The 
clear proclamation of the superhuman God, the tran- 
scendent spirit who is able to control and reinforce the 
spirit of man, and the setting forth of some way or some 
mediator, through whom man may meet and touch that 
Spirit so far removed vet so infinitely near and dear to 
him. It is with these matters that we shall be occupied in 
the next chapter. 



156 



CHAPTER SIX 
The Almighty and Everlasting God 

IF the transcendent element in man which endows 
him with the proud if tragic sense of personality 
is the first message of the preacher to a chattering 
and volatile world, and the second is the setting forth of 
what this endowment demands and how pitiably man 
fails to meet it, then the third message is of the Rock 
that is higher than he, even inclusive of his all, in whose 
composed and comprehensive Being his baffled and di- 
vided person may be gathered up, brought to its own con- 
summation of self. The rivers that pour tumultuously to 
their ocean bed, the ascending fire ever falling backward 
but leaping upward to the sun, are poor figures to ex- 
press the depth and irresistible urge of the passion in 
man for completeness, for repose, for power, for self- 
perception in self-expression, for victory and the attain- 
ment of the end. Conscious and divided spirit that he is, 
man turns away, sooner or later, with utter weariness 
and self-disgust from the nature which pleases him by 
betraying him, which maims his person that he may en- 
joy his senses, and reaches out after the other-worldly, 
the supernatural, the invisible and eternal Hope and 
Home of the Soul. 

Humanism which bids men sufficiently find God within 
themselves, if they think they need to find Him at all, 
seems not to comprehend this passion of pride and hu- 

157 



PREACH IXC. AND PAGANISM 

mility, this inner perception of the futility and the blun- 
der of the self-contained life. Life is so obviously not 
worth its brevity, its suffering, its withheld conclusions, 
its relative insignificance, if it must thus stand alone. All 
that can save it, preserve to it worth and dignity, main- 
tain its self-respect and mastery, is to find that abundant 
power without which confesses, certifies and seals the 
divinity within. 

How foredoomed to failure, then, especially in an age 
when men are surmounting life by placating it, enjoying 
it by being easy with themselves — how foredoomed to 
failure is the preaching which continues in the world of 
religion this exaltation of human sufficiency and natural 
values, domesticating them within the church. It is to 
laugh to see them there ! It means so transparent a sur- 
render, so pitiable a confession of defeat. If anything 
can bring the natural man into the sanctuary it is that 
there he has to bring his naturalness to the bar of a more- 
than-natural standard. If he comes at all, it will not be 
for entertainment and expansion but because there we in- 
sist on reverence and restraint. If church and preacher 
offer only a pietized and decorous naturalism, when he 
can get the real thing in naked and unashamed brutality 
without; if they offer him only another form of human- 
istic living, he will stay away. Such preaching is as bore- 
some as it is unnecessary. Such exercise of devotion is 
essentially superfluous and a rather humorous imposition 
upon the world. The only thing that will ever bring the 
natural man to listen to preaching is when it insists upon 
something more-than-the-natural and calls him to ac- 
count regarding it ; when it speaks of something different 
and better for him than this world and what it can offer. 
"Take my yoke upon you" is the attractive invitation, 

158 



THE ALMIGHTY AND EVERLASTING GOD 

"make inner obeisance and outward obedience to some- 
thing higher than thy poor self." 

It is clear, then, that these observations have a bearing 
upon our preaching of the doctrine of God. There is a 
certain illogicality, something humorous, in going into a 
church, of all places in the world, to be told how like we 
are to Him. The dull and average personality, the ordi- 
nary and not very valuable man, can probably listen in- 
differently and with a slow-growing hardness and dim re- 
sentment to that sort of preaching for a number of years. 
But the valuable, the highly personalized people, the 
saints, and the sinners, the great rebels and the great dis- 
ciples, who are the very folk for whom the church exists, 
would hate it, and they would know the final bitterness 
of despair if they thought that this was so. Either saint 
or sinner would consider it the supreme insult, the last 
pitch of insolence, for the church to be telling them that 
it is true. 

For they know within themselves that it is a lie. Their 
one hope hangs on God because His thoughts are not 
their thoughts, nor His ways their ways ; because He 
seeth the end from the beginning; because in Him there 
is no variableness, neither shadow that is caused by turn- 
ing; because no man shall see His face and live. They, 
the sinners and the saints, do not want to be told that 
they, within themselves, can heal themselves and that sin 
has no real sinfulness. That is tempting them to the final 
denial, the last depth of betrayal, the blurring of moral 
values, the calling of evil good and the saying that good 
is evil. They know that this is the unpardonable madness. 
In the hours when they, the saints and sinners, wipe their 
mouths and say, "We have done no harm" ; in the days 
when what they love is ugliness because it is ugly and 

159 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

shameless, and reckless expression because it is so terri- 
ble, so secretly appalling, so bittersweet with the sweet- 
ness of death, they know that it is the last affront to have 
the church — the one place where men expect they will be 
made to face the facts — bow these facts out of doors. 

No, we readily grant that the religious approach to the 
whole truth and to final reality is like any other one, 
cither scientific, economic, political, a partial approach. 
It sets forth for the most part only a group of facts. 
When it does not emphasize other facts, it does not 
thereby deny them. But it insists that the truth of man's 
differences, man's helplessness which the differences re- 
veal, and man's fate hanging therefore upon a transcend- 
ent God, are the key truths for the religious life. It is 
with that aspect of life the preacher deals, and if he fails 
to grapple with these problems and considerations, ig- 
nores these facts, his candlestick has been removed. 

The argument for a God. then, within His world, but 
also distinct from it, above its evil custom and in some 
sense untouched by its all-leveling life, is essential to the 
preservation of human personality, and personality is 
essential to dignity, to decency, to hope. The clearest and 
simplest thing to be said about the Hebrew God, lofty 
and inaccessible Being, with whom nevertheless His puri- 
fied and obedient children might have relationships, or 
about the "living God" of Greek theology, far removed 
from us but with whose deathless goodness, beauty and 
truth our mortality by some mediator may be endowed, is 
that the argument that supports such transcendence is the 
argument from necessity. It is the facts of experience, the 
very stuff of human life, coming down alike from He- 
braic and Hellenic civilization, which demand Him. Im- 
manence and transcendence are merely theistic terms for 
1 60 



THE ALMIGHTY AND EVERLASTING GOD 

identity and difference. Through them is revealed and 
discovered personality, the "I" which is the ultimate fact 
of my consciousness. I can but reckon from the known 
to the unknown. The world which produced me is also, 
then, a cosmic identity and difference. In that double fact 
is found divine personality. But that aspect of His Per- 
son, that portion of the fact which feeds the imaginative 
and volitional life, is the glorious and saving unlikeness of 
God — His unthinkable and inexpressible glory ; His utter 
comprehension and unbelievable compassion; His justice 
which knows no flaw and brooks no evasion and cannot 
be swerved ; His power which may not be withstood and 
hence is a sure and certain tenderness ; His hatred of sin, 
terrible and flaming, a hatred which will send sinful men 
through a thousand hells, if they will have them, and can 
only be saved thereby ; His love for men, which is what 
makes Him hate their sin and leads Him by His very na- 
ture as God to walk into hell with the sinner, suffering 
with him a thousand times more than the sinner is able 
to understand or know, — like the Paul who could not wish 
himself, for himself, in hell, but who did wish himself 
accursed of God for his brethren's sake ; like Jesus, who, 
in Gethsemane, would for Himself avoid His cross, but 
who accepted it and was willing to hang, forsaken of 
God, upon it, for the lives of men, identifying Himself 
to the uttermost with their fate. Yes ; it is such a super- 
nal God — that God who is apart, incredible, awful — that 
the soul of humanity craves and needs. 

Of course, here again, as throughout these discussions, 
we are returning to a form of the old dualism. We can- 
not seem to help it. We may construct philosophies like 
Hegel's in which thesis and antithesis merge in a higher 
synthesis ; we may use the dual view of the world as 
161 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

representing only a stage, a present achievement in cos- 
mic progress or human understanding. But that does not 
alter the incontestable witness of present experience that 

the religious consciousness is based upon, interwoven 
with, the sense of the cosmic division without, and the 
unresolved moral dualism within the individual life. It is 
important enough to remember, however, that we have 
rejected, at least tor this generation, the old scholastic 
theologies founded on this general experience. Fashions 
of thought change with significant facility; there is not 
much of the Absolute about them! Nevertheless we can- 
not think with forgotten terms. Therefore ours is no 
mechanically divided world where man and God, nature 
and supernature, soul and body, belong to mutually ex- 
clusive territories. We do not deny the principle of iden- 
tity. 1 lence we have discarded that old view of the world 
and all the elder doctrines of an absentee creator, a 
worthless and totally depraved humanity, a legalistic or 
substitutional-)- atonement, a magical and non-understand- 
able Incarnation which flowed from it. But we are not 
discarding with them that other aspect of the truth, the 
principle of separateness, nor those value judgments, that 
perpetual vision of another nature, behind and beneath 
phenomena, from which the old dualism took its rise. It 
is the form which it assumed, the interpretation of ex- 
perience which it gave, not the facts themselves, obscure 
but stubborn as they are, which it confessed, that we have 
dropped. Identity and difference are still here; man is a 
part of his world, but he is also apart from it. God is in 
nature and in us ; God is without and other than nature 
and most awfully something other than us. 

Indeed, the precise problem of the preacher today is to 
keep the old supernatural values and drop the old vocab- 
162 



THE ALMIGHTY AND EVERLASTING GOD 

ulary with the philosophy which induced it. We must 
acknowledge the universe as one, and yet be able to show 
that the He or the It, beyond and without the world, is 
its only conceivable beginning, its only conceivable end, 
the chief hope of its brevity, the only stay of its ideal- 
ism. It was the arbitrary and mechanical completeness of 
* the old division, not the reality that underlay the distinc- 
tion itself, which parted company with truth and hence 
lost the allegiance of the mind. It was that the old dual- 
ism tried to lock up this, the most baffling of all realities, 
in a formula, — that was what undid it. But we shall be 
equally foolish if now, in the interests of a new artificial 
clearness, we deny another portion of experience just as 
our fathers ignored certain other facts in the interests of 
their too well-defined systems. We cannot hold to the old 
world view which would bend the modern mind to the 
support of an inherited interpretation of experience and 
therefore would not any longer really explain or confirm 
it. Neither can we hold new views which mutilate the 
experience and leave out some of the most precious ele- 
ments in it, even if in so doing we should simplify the 
problem for the mind. It would be an unreal simplifica- 
tion ; it would darken, not illumine, the understanding; we 
should never rest in it. Nor do we need to be concerned 
if the intellect cannot perfectly order or easily dem- 
onstrate the whole of the religious life, fit each element 
with a self-verifying defense and explanation. No man 
of the world, to say nothing of a man of faith or imagi- 
nation, has ever yet trusted to a purely intellectual judg- 
ment. 

So we reject the old dualism, its dichotomized uni- 
verse, its two sorts of authority, its prodigious and arbi- 
trary supernaturalism. But we do not reject what lay 
163 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

behind it. Still we wrestle with the angel, lamed though 
we are by the contest, and we cannot let him go until the 
day breaks and the shadows flee away. It would be easier 
perhaps to give up the religious point of view, but for 
that ease we should pay with our life. For that swift 
answer, achieved by leaving out prime factors in the 
problem, we should be betraying the self for whose sake 
alone any answer is valuable. It does not pay to cut such 
Gordian knots ! Our task, then, is to preach transcend- 
ence again, not in terms of the old absolutist philoso- 
phy, but in terms of the perceptions, the needs, the ex- 
perience of the human heart and mind and will which 
produced that philosophy. 

Nor is this so hard to do. Now, as always for the 
genuinely religious temperament, there are abundant 
riches of material lying ready to its hand. It is not diffi- 
cult to make transcendence real and to reveal to men 
their consummate need of it when we speak of it in the 
language of experience and perception. What preaching 
should avoid is the abstractions of an archaic system of 
thought with all their provocative and contentious ele 7 
ments, the mingled dogmatism and incompleteness which 
any worked-out system contains. It is so foolish in the 
preacher to turn himself into a lay philosopher. Let him 
keep his insight clear, through moral discipline keep his 
intuitions high, his spirit pure, and then he can furnish 
the materials for philosophy. 

Thus an almost universal trait of the religious tem- 
perament is in its delight in beauty. Sometimes it is re- 
pressed by an irreligious asceticism or narrowed and 
stunted by a literal and external faith. But when the re- 
*/ ligious man is left free, it is appropriate to his gen- 
ius that he finds the world full of a high pleasure 
164 



THE. ALMIGHTY AND EVERLASTING GOD 

crowded with sound, color, fragrance, form, in which he 
takes exquisite delight. There is, in short, a serene and 
poetic naturalism, loosely called "nature-worship," which 
is keenly felt by both saints and sinners. All it needs for 
its consecration and perfection is to help men to see that 
this naturalism is vital and precious because, as a matter 
of fact, it is something more than naturalism, and more 
than pleasure objectified. 

Recall, for instance, the splendors of the external 
world and that best season of our climate, the 
long, slow-breathing autumn. What high pleasure we 
take in those hushed days of mid-November in the soft 
brown turf of the uplands, the fragrant smell of mellow 
earth and burning leaves, the purple haze that dims and 
magnifies the quiescent hills. Who is not strangely moved 
by that profound and brooding peace into which Nature 
then gathers up the multitudinous strivings, the myriad 
activities of her life? Who does not love to lie, in those 
slow-waning days upon the sands which hold within 
their golden cup the murmuring and dreaming sea? The 
very amplitude of the natural world, its far-flung grace 
and loveliness, spread out in rolling moor and winding 
stream and stately forest marching up the mountain-side, 
subdues and elevates the spirit of a man. 

Now, so it has always been and so men have always 
longed to be the worshipers of beauty. Therefore they 
have believed in a conscious and eternal Spirit behind it. 
Because again we know that personality is the only thing 
we have of absolute worth. A man cannot, therefore, 
worship beauty, wholly relinquish himself to its high de- 
lights, if he conceives of this majestic grace as imper- 
sonal and inanimate. For that which we worship must 
be greater than we. Behind it, therefore, just because it 

165 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

seems to us so beautiful, must be something that calls to 
the hidden deeps of the soul, something intimately akin to 
our own spirits. So man worships not nature, but the God 
of nature; senses an Eternal Presence behind all gracious 
form. For that interprets beauty and consecrates the 
spell of beauty over us. This gives a final meaning to 
what the soul perceives is an utter loveliness. This gives 
to beauty an eternal and cosmic significance commensu- 
rate to its charm and power. As long as men's hearts 
surge, too, when the tide yearns up the beach ; as long as 
their souls become articulate when the birds sing in the 
dawn, and the flowers lift themselves to the sun; so 
long will men believe that only from a supreme and 
conscious Loveliness, a joyous and a gracious Spirit could 
have come the beauty which is so intimately related to 
the spirit of a man. 

But not all saints and sinners are endowed with this 
joy and insight, this quick sensitiveness to beauty. 
Some of them cannot find the eternal and transcendent 
God in a loveliness which, by temperament, they either 
underrate or do not really see. There are a great many 
good people who cannot take beauty seriously. They be- 
come wooden and suspicious and uncomfortable when- 
ever they are asked to perceive or enjoy a lovely object. 
Incredible though it seems, it appears to them to be un- 
worthy of any final allegiance, any complete surrender, 
any unquestioning joy. But there are other ways in which 
they, too, may come to this sense of transcendence, other 
aspects of experience which also demand it. Most often 
it is just such folk who cannot perceive beauty, because 
they are practical or scientific or condemned to mean 
surroundings, who do feel to the full the grim force and 
terror of the external world. Prudence, caution, hard 
1 66 



THE ALMIGHTY AND EVERLASTING GOD 

sense are to the fore with them ! Very well ; there, too, 
in these perceptions is an open door for the human spirit 
to transcend its environment, get out of its physical shell. 
The postulate of the absolute worth of beauty may be an 
argument for God drawn from subjective necessity. But 
the postulate of sovereign moral Being behind the tyr- 
anny and brutality of nature is an argument of objective 
necessity as well; here we all need God to explain the 
world. 

For we deal with what certainly appear to be objective 
aspects of the truth, when we regard ourselves in our 
relation to the might of the physical universe. For even 
as men feed upon its beauty, so they have found it neces- 
sary to discover something which should enable them to 
live above and unafraid of its material and gigantic 
power. We have already seen how there appears to be a 
cosmic hostility to human life which sobers indeed those 
who are intelligent enough to perceive it. It is only the 
fool or the brute or the sentimentalist who is unterrified 
by nature. The man of reflection and imagination sees 
his race crawling ant-like over its tiny speck of slowly 
cooling earth and surrounded by titanic and ruthless 
forces which threaten at any moment to engulf it. The 
religious man knows that he is infinitely greater than the 
beasts of the field or the clods of the highway. Yet Vesu- 
vius belches forth its liquid fire and in one day of stark 
terror the great city which was full of men is become 
mute and desolate. The proud liner scrapes along the 
surface of the frozen berg and crumples like a ship of 
cards. There is a splash, a cry, a white face, a lifted 
arm, and then all the pride and splendor, all the hopes 
and fears, the gorgeous dreams, the daring thoughts are 
167 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

gone. But the ice floats on unscarred and undeterred and 
the ocean tosses and heaves just as it did before. 

Now, ifjhis is all, if there is for us only the physical 
might of nature and the world is only what it seems to 
be; n" there is no other God exeept such as can be found 
within this sort of OOSmic process, then human life i^ a 
sardonic muekery, and self-respect a silly farce, and all 
the heroism of the heart and the valor of the mind the 
unmeaning activities of an insignificant atom. The very 
men who will naturally enter your churches are the ones 
who have always found that theory of life intolerable. It 
doesn't take in all the facts. They could not live by it 
and the soul of the race, looking out upon this universe 
of immeasurable material bulk, has challenged it and 
dared to assert its OWH superiority. 

So by this road these men come back to the tran- 
scendent God without whom they cannot guard that in- 
tegrity of personality which we are all set to keep. For 
here there is no way of believing in oneself, no way of 
enduring this world or our place in it and no tolerable way 
of understanding it except we look beneath this cosmic 
hostility and find our self-respect and a satisfying cosmic 
meaning in perceiving spiritual force, a conscious ethical 
purpose, which interpenetrates the thunder and the light- 
ning, which lies behind the stars as they move in their 
perpetual courses. "Through it the most ancient heavens 
are fresh and strong." Integrity of personality in such a 
world as this, belief in self, without which life is dust 
and ashes in the mouth, rest on the sublime assumption 
that suffusing material force is ethical spirit, more like 
unto us than it, controlling force in the interest of moral 
and eternal purposes. In these purposes living, not me- 
chanical, forces play a major part. 
168 



THE ALMIGHTY AND EVERLASTING GOD 

Of course, to all such reasoning the Kantians and hu- 
manists reply that these notions of an objective and eter- 
nal beauty, of a transcendent and actual Cosmic Being 
exist within the mind. They are purely subjective ideas, 
they are bounded by the inexorable circle of our experi- 
ence, hence they offer no proof of any objective reality 
which may in greater or less degree correspond to them. 

However, there must be a "source" of these ideas. To 
which the philosophers reply, Yes, they are "primitive and 
necessary," produced by reason only, without borrowing 
anything from the senses or the understanding. Yet there 
is no sufficient evidence that the idea of God is thus pro- 
duced by any faculty of mind acting in entire freedom 
from external influence. On the contrary, the idea ap- 
pears to owe much to the operation of external things 
upon the mind ; it is not then the wholly unaffected prod- 
uct of reason. It is a response no less than an intuition. 
Like all knowledge a discovery, but the discovery of 
something there which could be discovered, hence, in 
that sense, a revelation. 

It is not necessary, then, for men to meet their situa- 
tion in the cosmos by saying with Kant: We will act as 
though there were a God, although we are always con- 
scious that we have no real knowledge of Him as an ex- 
ternal being. In the light of the tragic' circumstances of 
humanity, this is demanding the impossible. No sane body 
of men will ever get sufficient inspiration for life or find 
an adequate solution for the problem of life by resting 
upon mere value judgments which they propose, by an ef- 
fort of will, to put in the place of genuine reality judg- 
ments. Indeed, there is a truly scholastic naivete, a sort 
of solemn and unconscious humor, in seriously proposing 
that men should vitalize and consecrate their deepest 
169 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

purposes and most difficult experiences by hypothesizing 
mere appearances and illusions. 

Nor are we willing either to say with Santayana that 
all our sense of the beauty of the world is merely pleas- 
ure objectified and that we can infer no eternal Beauty 
from it. We arc aware that there cannot be an immediate 
knowledge of a reality distinct from ourselves, that all 
our knowledge must be, in the nature of the case, an 
idea, a mental representation, that we can never know 
the Thing Itself. But if we believe, as we logically and 
reasonably may, that our subjective ideas are formed 
under the influence of objects unknown but without us, 
produced by stimuli, real, if not perceived apart from 
our own consciousness, then we may say that what we 
have is a mediate or representative knowledge not only 
of an Eternal Being but formed under the influence of 
that Being. Nor does the believer ask for more. He does 
not expect to see the King in His beauty; he only needs 
to know that He is, that He is there. 

How self-verifying and moving, then, are the appeals 
ready to our hands. As long as man with the power to 
question, to strive, to aspire, to endure, to suffer, lives in 
a universe of ruthless and overwhelming might, so long, 
if he is to understand it or maintain his reason and his 
dignity, he will believe it to be controlled by a Spirit be- 
yond no less than within, from whom his spirit is derived. 
It is out of the struggle to revere and conserve human 
personality, out of the belief in the indefectible worth 
and honor of selfhood that our race has fronted a uni- 
verse in arms, and pitting its soul against nature has 
cried, ''God is my refuge : underneath me, at the very 
moment when I am engulfed in earthquake shock or shat- 
tered in the battle's roar, there are everlasting arms !" 
170 



THE ALMIGHTY AND EVERLASTING GOD 

There is something which is too deep for tears in the un- 
conquerable idealism, the utter magnanimity of the faith 
of the human spirit in that which will answer to itself, 
as evidenced in this forlorn and glorious adventure of 
the soul. Sometimes we are constrained to ask ourselves, 
How can the heart of man go so undismayed through the 
waste places of the world? 

But, of course, the preacher's main task is to interpret 
man's moral experience, which drives him out to search 
for the eternal in the terms of the "other" and redeem- 
ing God. We have spoken of the depersonalizing of re- 
ligion which paganism and humanism alike have brought 
upon the world. One evidence of that has been the way 
in which we have confounded the social expressions of 
religion with its individual source. We are so concerned 
with the effect of our religion upon the community that 
we have forgotten that the heart of religion is found in 
the solitary soul. All of which means that we have here 
again yielded to the time spirit that enfolds us and have 
come to think of man as religious if he be humane. But 
that is not true. No man is ever religious until he becomes 
devout. And indeed no man of our sort — the saint and 
sinner sort — is ever long and truly humane unless the 
springs of his tenderness for men are found in his ever 
widening and deepening gratitude to God ! Hence no man 
was ever yet able to preach the living God until he under- 
stood that the central need in human life is to reconcile 
the individual conscience to itself, compose the anarchy 
of the spiritual life. Men want to be happy and be fed ; 
but men must have inward peace. 

We swing back, therefore, to the native ground of 
preaching, approach the religious problem, now, not from 
the aesthetic or the scientific, but from the moral angle. 
171 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

1 [ere we are dealing with the most poignant of all human 
experiences. For it is in this intensely personal world of 
moral failure and divided will that men are most acutely 
aware of themselves and hence of their need of that 
other-than-self beyond. The sentimental idealizing of 
contemporary life, the declension of the humanist's opti- 
mism into that superficial complacency which will not see 
what it does not like or what it is not expedient to see, 
makes one's mind to chuckle while one's heart doth ache. 
There is a brief heyday, its continuance dependent upon 
the uncontrollable factors of outward prosperity, physical 
and nervous vigor, capacity for preoccupation with the 
successive novelties of a diversified and complicated 
civilization, in which even men of religious temperament 
can minimize or ignore, perhaps sincerely disbelieve in, 
their divided life. Sometimes we think we may sin and 
be done with it. But always in the end man must come 
hack to this moral tragedy of the soul. Because sin will 
not be done with tis when we are done with it. Every 
evil is evil to him that does it and sooner or later we are 
compelled to understand that to be a sinner is the sorest 
and most certain punishment for sinning. 

Then the awakening begins. Then can preaching stir 
the heart until deep answereth unto deep. It can talk of 
the struggle with moral temptation and weakness ; of the 
unstable temperament which oscillates between the gutter 
and the stars ; of the perversion or abuse of impulses 
good in themselves ; of the dreadful dualism of the soul. 
For these are inheritances which have made life tragic 
in every generation for innumerable human beings. Who- 
ever needed to explain to a company of grown men and 
women what the cry of the soul for its release from pas- 
sion is ? Every generation has its secret pessimists, brood- 
172 



THE ALMIGHTY AND EVERLASTING GOD 

ing over the anarchy of the spirit, the issues of a dis- 
tracted life. We need not ask with Faust, ''Where is that 
place which men call 'Hell'?" nor wait for Mephistoph- 
eles to answer, 

" Hell is in no set place, nor is it circumscribed, 
For where we are — is Hell!" 

Now, it is from such central and poignant experiences 
as these that men have been constrained to look outward 
for a God. FoF-i;hese mark the very disintegration of per- 
sonality, the utter dissipation of selfhood. That is the 
inescapable horror of sin. That is what we mean when we 
say sinners are lost; so they are, they are lost to their 
own selves. With what discriminating truth the father 
in the parable of the lost boy speaks. "This, my son," he 
says, "was dead though he is alive again." So it is with 
us ; being is the price we pay for sinning. The more we do 
wrong the less we are. How then shall we become alive 
again ? 

It is out of the shame and passion, the utter need 
of the human heart, which such considerations show to be 
real that men have built up their redemptive faiths. For 
all moral victory is conditioned upon help from without. 
To be sure each will and soul must strive desperately, 
even unto death, yet all that strife shall be in vain unless 
One stoops down from above and wrestles with us in 
the conflict. For the sinner must have two things, both 
of them beyond his unaided getting, or he will die. He 
must be released from his captivity. Who does not know 
the terrible restlessness, that grows and feeds upon itself 
and then does grow some more, of the man bound by 
evil and wanting to get out ? The torture of sin is that it 
deprives us of the power to express ourselves. The cry 

173 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

of moral misery, therefore, is always the groaning of the 
prisoner. Oh, for help to break the bars of my intolerable 
and delicious sin that I may be myself once more! Oh, 
for some power greater than I which, being greater, can 
set me free ! 

But more than the sinner wants to be free does he 
want to be kept. Along with the passion for liberty is 
the desire for surrender. Again, then, he wants some- 
thing outside himself, some Being so far above the world 
he lives in that it can take him. the whole of him, break 
his life, shake it to its foundations, then pacify, compose 
it. make it anew, lie is so tired of his sin ; he is so weary 
with striving; he wants to relinquish it all; get far away 
from what he is ; flee like a bird to the mountain ; lay 
down his life before the One like whom he would be. So 
he wants power, he wants peace. He would be himself, he 
would lose himself. He prays for freedom, he longs for 
captivity. 

Now, out of these depths of human life, these vast 
antinomies of the spirit, has arisen man's belief in a Sav- 
iour-God. Sublime and awful are the sanctions upon 
which it rests. Out of the extremity and definiteness of 
our need we know that He must be and we know what 
He must be like. He is the One to whom all hearts are 
open, all desires known, from whom no secrets are hid. 
Who could state the mingling of desire and dread with 
which men strive after, and hide from, such a God? We 
want Him, yet until we have Him how we fear 
Him. For that inclusive knowledge of us which is God, 
if only we can bear to come to it, endows us with free- 
dom. For then all the barriers are down, there is noth- 
ing to conceal, nothing to explain, nothing to hold back. 
Then reality and appearance coincide, character and con- 

174 



THE ALMIGHTY AND EVERLASTING GOD 

dition correspond. I am what I am before Him. Supreme 
reality from without answers and completes my own, and 
makes me real, and my reality makes me free. 

But if He thus knows me, and through that knowledge 
every inner inhibition melts in His presence and every 
damning secret's out, and all my life is spread like an 
open palm before His gaze, and I am come at last, 
through many weary roads, unto my very self, why then 
I can let go, I can relinquish myself. The dreadful ten- 
sion's gone and in utter surrender the soul is poured out, 
until, spent and expressed, rest and peace flood back into 
the satisfied life. So the life is free; so the life is bound. 
So a man stands upon his feet ; so he clings to the Rock 
that is higher than he. So the life is cleansed in burning 
light; so the soul is hid in the secret of God's presence. 
So men come to themselves ; so men lose themselves in 
the Eternal. There is perfect freedom at last because we 
have attained to complete captivity. There is power ac- 
companied by peace. That is the gift which the vision of 
a God, morally separate from, morally other than we, 
brings to the inward strife, the spiritual agony of the 
world. This is the need which that faith satisfies. It is, I 
suppose, in this exulting experience of moral freedom 
and spiritual peace which comes to those men who make 
the experiment of faith that they, for the most part, find 
their sufficient proof of the divine reality. Who ever 
doubted His existence who could cry with all that innu- 
merable company of many kindreds and peoples and 
tongues : 

"He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of 
the miry clay ; 
And he set my feet upon a rock, and established my 
goings. 

175 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

And he hath put a new song in my mouth, even praise 
unto our God." 

Here, then, is the preaching which is religious. How 
foolish are we not to preach it more ! How trivial and im- 
pertinent it is to question the permanence of the religious 
interpretation of the world! What a revelation of per- 
sona] insignificance it is to fail to revere the majesty of 
the devout and aspiring life! That which a starved and 
restless and giddy world has lost is this pool of quietness, 
this tower of strength, this cleansing grace of salvation, 
this haven o\ the Spirit. Belief in a transcendent deity is 
as natural as hunger and thirst, as necessary as sleep and 
breathing. It was the inner and essential needs of our fa- 
thers' lives which drove them out to search for Him. It 
will he the inner and essential needs of the lives of our 
children that shall bring them to the altar where their 
fathers and their fathers' fathers bowed down before 
them. Are we going to be afraid to keep its fires burning? 

And so we come to our final and most difficult aspect 
of this transcendent problem. We have talked of the man 
who is separate from nature, and who knows himself as 
man because behind nature he sees the God from whom 
he is separate, too. We have seen how he needs that 
"otherness" in God to maintain his personality and how 
the gulf between him and that God induces that sense of 
helplessness which makes the humility and penitence of 
the religious life. We must come now to our final ques- 
tion. How is he to bridge the gulf? By what power can he 
go through with this experience we have just been relat- 
ing and find his whole self in a whole world ? How can he 
dare to try it ? How can he gain power to achieve it ? 

Perhaps this is the central difficulty of all religion. It 
is certainly the one which the old Greeks felt. Plato, the 
176 



THE ALMIGHTY AND EVERLASTING GOD 

father of Christian theology, and all neo-platonists, knew 
that the gulf is here between man and God and they knew 
that something or someone must bridge it for us. They 
perceived that man, unaided, cannot leap it at a stride. 
We proceed, driven by the facts of life, to the point 
where the soul looks up to the Eternal and confesses the 
kinship, and knows that only in His light shall it see 
light, and that it only shall be satisfied when it awakes in 
His likeness. But how shall the connection be made? 
What shall enable us to do that mystic thing, come back 
to God? We have frightful handicaps in the attempt. 
How shall the distrust that sin creates, the hardness that 
sin forms, the despair and helplessness that sin induces, 
the dreadful indifference which is its expression, — how 
shall they be removed? How shall the unfaith which the 
mystery, the suffering, the evil of the world induce be 
overcome? Being a sinner I do not dare, and being ig- 
norant I do not believe, to come. God is there and God 
wants us ; like as a father pitieth his children so He pit- 
ieth us. He knoweth our frame, He remembereth that 
we are dust. We know that is true ; again we do not know 
it is true. All the sin that is in us and all which that sin 
has done to us insists and insists that it is not true. And 
the mind wonders — and wonders. What shall break that 
distrust ; and melt away the hardness so that we have an 
open mind; and send hope into despair, hope with its 
accompanying confidence to act ; change unfaith to belief, 
until, in having faith, we thereby have that which faith 
believes in? How amazing is life! We look out into the 
heavenly country, we long to walk therein, we have so 
little power to stir hand or foot to gain our entrance. We 
know it is there but all the facts of our rebellious or self- 
177 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

centered life, individual and associated alike, are against 
it and therefore we do not know that it is there. 

Philosophy and reason and proofs of logic cannot 
greatly help us here. No man was ever yet argued into 
the kingdom of God. We cannot convince ourselves of 
our souls. For we are creatures, not minds; lives, not 
ideas. Only life can convince life; only a Person but, of 
course, a transcendent person that is more like Him than 
like us. can make that Othcr-who-lives certain and sure 
for us. This necessity for some intermediary who shall 
be a human yet more-than-human proof that God is and 
that man may be one with Him; this reinforcing of the 
old argument from subjective necessity by its verifica- 
tion in the actual stuff of objective life, has been every- 
where sought by men. 

Saviours, redeemers, mediators, then, are not theologi- 
cal manikins. They are not superfluous figures born of 
a mistaken notion of the universe. They are not second- 
ary gods, concessions to our childishness. They, too, are 
called for in the nature of things. But to really mediate 
they must have the qualities of both that which they 
transmit and of those who receive the transmission. 
Most of all they must have that "other" quality, so tri- 
umphant and self-verifying that seeing it constrains be- 
lief. A mediator wholly unlike ourselves would be a 
meaningless and mocking figure. But a mediator who 
was chiefly like ourselves would be a contradiction in 
terms ! 

So we come back again to the old problem. Man needs 
some proof that he who knows that he is more than 
dust can meet with that other life from whose star his 
speck has been derived. Something has got to give him 
powerful reinforcement for this supreme effort of will, 

i 7 8 



THE ALMIGHTY AND EVERLASTING GOD 

of faith. If only he could know that he and it ever have 
met in the fields of time and space, then he would be 
saved. For that would give him the will to believe ; that 
would prove the ultimate ; give him the blessed assurance 
which heals the wounds of the heart. Then he would have 
power to surrender. Then he would no longer fear the 
gulf, he would walk out onto it and know that as he 
walked he was with God. 

Some such reasoning as this ought to make clear the 
place that Jesus holds in Christian preaching and why 
we call Him Saviour and why salvation comes for us 
who are of His spiritual lineage, through Him. Of 
course it is true that Jesus shows to all discerning eyes 
what man may be. But that is not the chief secret of 
His power; that is not why churches are built to Him 
and His cross still fronts, defeated but unconquerable, 
our pagan world. Jesus was more-than-nature and more- 
than-human. It is this "other" quality, operative and ob- 
jectified in His experience within our world, which gives 
Him the absoluteness which makes Him indispensable 
and precious. The mystery is deepest here. For here we 
transfer the antinomy from thought to conduct ; from in- 
ner perception to one Being's actual experience. Here, in 
Him, we say we see it resolved into its higher synthesis 
in actual operation. 

Here, then, we can almost look into it. Yet when we 
do gaze, our eyes dazzle, our minds swerve, it is too 
much. It is not easy, indeed, at the present time it seems 
to be impossible to reconcile the Christ of history with 
the Christ of experience. Yet there would be neither right 
nor reason in saying that the former was more of a real- 
ity than the latter. And all the time the heart from which 
great thoughts arise, "the heart which has its reasons of 
179 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

which the mind knows nothing," says, Here in Him is the 
consummate quality, the absolute note of life. Here the 
impossible has been accomplished. Here the opposites 
meet and the contradictions blend. Here is something so 
incredible that it is true. 

( )f course, Jesus is of us and He is ours. That is true 
and it is inexpressibly sweet to remember it. Again, to 
use our old solecism, that is the lesser part of the truth; 
the greater part, for men of religion, is that Jesus is of 
God, that He belongs to Him. His chief office for our 
world has not been to show us what men can be like ; it 
lias been to give us the vision of the Eternal in a human 
face. For if He does reveal God to man then He must 
held, as President Tucker says, the quality and substance 
of the life which He reveals. 

Mere is where He differs immeasurably from even a 
Socrates. What men want most to believe about Jesus 
is this, that when we commune with Him, we are with 
the infinite; that man's just perception of the Eternal 
Spirit, his desire to escape from time into reality, may 
be fulfilled in Jesus. That is the Gospel: Come unto Him, 
all ye that labor and are heavy laden, for He will give 
you rest. Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst 
again. But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall 
give him shall never thirst ; but the water that I shall 
give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into 
everlasting life. If the Son therefore shall make you free, 
you shall be free indeed. 

Now, if all this is true, what is the religious preaching 
of Jesus, what aspect of His person meets the spiritual 
need? Clearly, it is His transcendence. It is not worthy 
of us to evade it because we cannot explain it. Surely 
what has hastened our present paganism has been the re- 
180 



THE ALMIGHTY AND EVERLASTING GOD 

moval from the forefront of our consciousness of Jesus 
the Saviour, the divine Redeemer, the absolute Meeter 
of an absolute need. Of such preaching of Jesus we have 
today very little. The pendulum has swung far to the 
left, to the other exclusive emphasis, too obviously influ- 
enced by the currents of the day. It was perhaps inevita- 
ble that He should for a time drop out of His former 
place in Christian preaching under this combined human- 
istic and naturalistic movement. But it means that again 
we have relinquished those values which have made Jesus 
the heart of humanity. 

Of course, He was a perfected human character inspired 
above all men by the spirit of God, showing the capacity 
of humanity to hold Divinity. This is what Mary cele- 
brates in her paean, "He that is mighty has magnified me 
and holy is his name." But is this what men have passion- 
ately adored in Jesus? Has love of Him been self-love? 
Is this why He has become the sanctuary of humanity? 
I think not. We have for the moment no good language 
for the other conception of Him. He is indeed the pledge 
of what we may be, but how many of us would ever be- 
lieve that pledge unless there was something else in Him, 
more than we, that guaranteed it? What, as President 
Tucker asks, is this power which shall make "maybe" 
into "is" for us? "Without doubt the trend of modern 
thought and faith is toward the more perfect identifica- 
tion of Christ with humanity. We cannot overestimate 
the advantage to Christianity of this tendency. The world 
must know and feel the humanity of Jesus. But it makes 
the greatest difference in result whether the ground of 
the common humanity is in Him or in us. To borrow the 
expressive language of Paul, was He 'created' in us? Or 
are we 'created' in Him? Grant the right of the affirma- 
181 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

tion that 'there is no difference in kind between the di- 
vine and the human' ; allow the interchange of terms so 
that one may speak of the humanity of God and the di- 
vinity of man; appropriate the motive which lies in these 
attempts to bring God and man together and thus to ex- 
plain the personality of Jesus Christ, it is still a matter 
of infinite concern whether His home is in the higher or 
the lower regions of divinity. After all, very little is 
gained by the transfer of terms. Humanity is in no way 
satisfied with its degree of divinity. We are still as anx- 
ious as ever to rise above ourselves and in this anxiety 
we want to know concerning our great helper, whether 
He has in Himself anything more than the possible in- 
crease of a common humanity. What is His power to 
lift and how long may it last ? Shall we ever reach His 
level, become as divine as He, or does He have part in 
the absolute and infinite? This question may seem remote 
in result but it i< everything in principle. The immanence 
of Christ has its present meaning and value because of 
His transcendence. ,,a 

Preaching today is not moving on the level of this dis- 
cussion, is neither asking nor attempting to answer its 
questions. Great preaching in some way makes men see 
the end of the road, not merely the direction in which it 
travels. The power to do that we have lost if we have lost 
the more-than-us in Jesus. Humanity, unaided, cannot 
look to that end which shall explain the beginning. And 
does Jesus mean very much to us if He is only "Jesus" ? 
Why do we answer the great invitation, "Come unto 
me"? Because He is something other than us? Because 
He calls us away from ourselves? back to home? Most 

1 "The Satisfaction of Humanity in Jesus Christ," Andover 
Review, January, 1893. 

182 



THE ALMIGHTY AND EVERLASTING GOD 

of us no longer know how to preach on that plane of ex- 
perience or from the point of view where such questions 
are serious and real. Our fathers had a world view and 
a philosophy which made such preaching easy. But their 
power did not lie in that world view ; it lay in this vision 
of Jesus which produced the view. Is not this the vision 
which we need? 



183 



CHAPTER SEVEN 

Worship as the Chief Approach to 
Transcendence 

WHATEVER becomes the inward and the in- 
visible grace of the Christian community 
such will be its outward and visible form. 
Those regulative ideas and characteristic emotions which 
determine in any age the quality of its religious experi- 
ence will be certain to shape the nature and conduct of its 
ecclesiastical assemblies. Their influence will show, both 
in the liturgical and homiletical portions of public wor- 
ship. If anything further were needed, therefore, to in- 
dicate the secularity of this age, its substitutes for wor- 
ship and its characteristic type of preaching would, in 
themselves, reveal the situation. So we venture to devote 
these closing discussions to some observations on the 
present state of Protestant public worship and the pre- 
vailing type of Protestant preaching. For we may thus 
ascertain how far those ideas and perceptions which an 
age like ours needs are beginning to find an expression 
and what means may be taken to increase their influence 
through church services in the community. 

We begin, then, in this chapter, not with preaching, 
but with worship. It seems to me clear that the chief of- 
fice of the church is liturgical rather than homiletical. 
Or, if that is too technical a statement, it may be said 
that the church exists to set forth and foster the religious 
184 



CHIEF APPROACH TO TRANSCENDENCE 

life and that, because of the nature of that life, it finds 
its chief opportunity for so doing in the imaginative 
rather than the rationalizing or practical areas of human 
expression. Even as Michael Angelo, at the risk of his 
life, purloined dead bodies that he might dissect them 
and learn anatomy, so all disciples of the art of religion 
need the discipline of intellectual analysis and of knowl- 
edge of the facts of the religious experience if they are 
to be leaders in faith. There is a toughness of fiber needed 
in religious people that can only come through such men- 
tal discipline. But anatomists are not sculptors. Michael 
Angelo was the genius, the creative artist, not because 
he understood anatomy, but chiefly because of those as 
yet indefinable and secret processes of feeling and intui- 
tion in man, which made him feel rather than under- 
stand the pity and the terror, the majesty and the pathos 
of the human spirit and reveal them in significant and 
expressive line. Knowledge supported rather than rivaled 
insight. In the same way, both saint and sinner need re- 
ligious instruction. Nevertheless they are what they are 
because they are first perceptive rather than reasoning 
beings. They both owe, the one his salvation, the other 
his despair, to the fact that they have seen the vision of 
the holy universe. Both are seers ; the saint has given his 
allegiance to the heavenly vision. The sinner has resolved 
to be disobedient unto it. Both find their first and more 
natural approach to religious truth, therefore, through the 
creative rather than the critical processes, the emotional 
rather than the informative powers. 

There are, of course, many in our churches who would 
dissent from this opinion. It is characteristic of Prot- 
estantism, as of humanism in general, that it lays its chief 
emphasis upon the intelligence. If we go to church to 

185 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

practice the presence of God, must we not first know who 
and what this God is whose presence with US we are there 
asked to realize? So most Protestant services are more 
informative than inspirational. Their attendants are as- 
sembled to hear about God rather to taste and see that 
the Lord is good. They analyze the religious experience 
rather than enjoy it; insensibly they come to regard the 
spiritual life as a proposition to be proved, not a power 
to be appropriated. Hence our services generally consist 
of some "preliminary exercises," as we ourselves call 
them, leading up to the climax — when it is a climax — of 
the sermon. 

Here is a major cause for the declension of the influ- 
ence of Protestant church services. They go too much on 
the assumption that men already possess religion and that 
they come to church to discuss it rather than to have it 
provided. They call men to be listeners rather than par- 
ticipants in their temples. Of course, one may find God 
through the mind. The great scholar, the mathematician 
or the astronomer may cry with Kepler, "Behold, I think 
the thoughts of God after him !" Yet a service which 
places its chief emphasis upon the appeal to the will 
through instruction has declined from that realm of the 
absolutes where religion in its purest form belongs. For 
since preaching makes its appeal chiefly through reason, 
it thereby attempts to produce only a partial and relative 
experience in the life of the listener. It impinges upon the 
will by a slow process. Sometimes one gets so deadly 
weary of preaching because, in a world like ours, the 
reasonable process is so unreasonable. That's a half truth, 
of course, but one that the modern world needs to learn. 

Others would dissent from our position by saying that 
service, the life of good will, is a sufficient worship. The 
186 



CHIEF APPROACH TO TRANSCENDENCE 

highest adoration is to visit the widows and the father- 
less in their affliction. Laborare est orare. What we do 
speaks so loud God does not care for what we say. True : 
but the value of what we do for God depends upon the 
godliness of the doer and where shall he find that godli- 
ness save in the secret place of the Most High ? And the 
greatest gift we can give our fellows is to bring them 
into the divine presence. "There is," says Dr. William 
Adams Brown, "a service that is directed to the satisfac- 
tion of needs already in existence, and there is a service 
that is itself the creator of new needs which enlarge the 
capacity of the man to whom it would minister. To this 
larger service religion is committed, and the measure of 
a man's fitness to render it is his capacity for worship." 
But no one can give more than he has. If we are to offer 
such gifts we must ourselves go before and lead. To cre- 
ate the atmosphere in which the things of righteousness 
and holiness seem to be naturally exalted above the physi- 
cal, the commercial, the domestic affairs of men ; to lift 
the level of thought and feeling to that high place where 
the spiritual consciousness contributes its insights and 
finds a magnanimous utterance — is there anything that 
our world needs more? There are noble and necessary 
ministries to the body and the mind, but most needed, and 
least often offered, there is a ministry to the human spirit. 
This is the gift which the worshiper can bring. Knowl- 
edge of God may not be merely or even chiefly compre- 
hended in a concept of the intelligence ; knowledge of 
Him is that vitalizing consciousness of the Presence felt 
in the heart, which opens our eyes that we may see that 
the mountain is full of horses and chariots of fire round 
about us and that they who fight with us are more than 
they who fight with them. This is the true and central 

187 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

knowledge that private devotion and public worship alone 
can give ; preaching can but conserve and transmit this re- 
ligious experience through the mind, worship creates it 
in the heart. Edwards understood that neither thought 
nor conduct can take its place. "The sober performance 
of moral duty." said he, "is no substitute for passionate 
devotion to a Being with its occasional moments of joy 
and exaltation." 

We should then begin with worship. A church which 
does not emphasize it before everything else is trying to 
build the structure of a spiritual society with the corner 
stone left out. Let us try, first of all, to define it. An old 
and popular definition of the descriptive sort says that 
"worship is the response of the soul to the consciousness 
of being in the presence of God." A more modern defini- 
tion, analyzing the psychology of worship, defines it as 
"the unification of consciousness around the central con- 
trolling idea of God, the prevailing emotional tone being 
that of adoration." Evidently we mean, then, by worship 
the appeal to the religious will through feeling and the 
imagination. Worship is therefore essentially creative. 
Every act of worship seeks to bring forth then and 
there a direct experience of God through high and con- 
centrated emotion. It fixes the attention upon Him as an 
object in Himself supremely desirable. The result of this 
unified consciousness is peace and the result of this peace 
and harmony is a new sense of power. Worship, then, is 
the attainment of that inward wholeness for which in one 
form or another all religion strives by means of contem- 
plation. So by its very nature it belongs to the class of 
the absolutes. 

Many psychologies of religion define this contempla- 
tion as aesthetic, and make worship a higher form of de- 
188 



CHIEF APPROACH TO TRANSCENDENCE 

light. This appears to me a quite typical non-religious in- 
terpretation of a religious experience. There are four 
words which need explaining when we talk of worship. 
They are : wonder, admiration, awe, reverence. Wonder 
springs from the recognition of the limitations of our 
knowledge; it is an experience of the mind. Admiration 
is the response of a growing intelligence to beauty, partly 
an aesthetic, partly an intellectual experience. These dis- 
tinctions Coleridge had in mind in his well-known sen- 
tence : "In wonder all philosophy began ; in wonder it 
ends ; and admiration fills up the interspace. But the first 
wonder is the offspring of ignorance ; the last is the par- 
ent of adoration." Awe is the sense-perception of the stu- 
pendous power and magnitude of the universe ; it is, quite 
literally, a godly fear. But it is not ignoble nor cringing, 
it is just and reasonable, the attitude, toward the Whole, 
of a comprehensive sanity. 

Thus "I would love Thee, O God, if there were no 
heaven, and if there were no hell, I would fear Thee no 
less." Reverence is devotion to goodness, sense of awe- 
struck loyalty to a Being manifestly under the influence 
of principles higher than our own. 1 Now it is with these 
last two, awe and reverence, rather than wonder and ad- 
miration, that worship has to do. 

Hence the essence of worship is not aesthetic contem- 
plation. Without doubt worship does gratify the aesthetic 
instinct and most properly so. There is no normal expres- 
sion of man's nature which has not its accompanying de- 
light. The higher and more inclusive the expression the 
more exquisite, of course, the delight. But that pleasure is 
the by-product, not the object, of worship. It itself springs 

1 For a discussion of these four words see Allen, Reverence 
as the Heart of Christianity, pp. 253 fr. 

189 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

partly from the awe of the infinite and eternal majesty 
which induces the desire to prostrate oneself before the 
Lord our Maker. "I have heard of Thee by the hearing 
of the ear : but now mine eye seeth Thee. Wherefore I 
abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes." It also 
springs partly from passionate devotion of a loyal will to 
a holy Being. "Behold, as the eyes of servants look unto 
the hand of their masters and as the eyes of a maid unto 
the hand of her mistress; so our eyes wait upon the 
Lord." Thus reverence is the high and awe-struck hunger 
for spiritual communion. "My soul thirsteth for God, for 
the living God. When shall I come and appear before 
God?" 

There is a noble illustration of the nature and the uses 
of worship in the Journals of Jonathan Edwards, dis- 
tinguished alumnus of Yale College, and the greatest 
mind this hemisphere has produced. You remember what 
he wrote in them, as a youth, about the young woman 
who later became his wife: "They say there is a young 
lady in New Haven who is beloved of that great Being 
who made and rules the world, and that there are certain 
seasons in which this great Being in some way or other 
invisible comes to her and fills her mind with exceeding 
sweet delight, and that she hardly cares for anything ex- 
cept to meditate on Him. Therefore if you present all 
the world before her, with the richest of its treasures, 
she disregards and cares not for it and is unmindful of 
any pain or affliction. She has a strange sweetness in her 
mind, and singular purity in her affections, is most just 
and conscientious in all her conduct, and you could not 
persuade her to do anything wrong or sinful if you would 
give her all the world, lest she should offend this great 
Being. She is of wonderful calmness and universal benev- 
190 



CHIEF APPROACH TO TRANSCENDENCE 

olence of mind, especially after this great God has mani- 
fested Himself to her mind. She will sometimes go about 
from place to place singing sweetly and seems to be al- 
ways full of joy and pleasure, and no one knows for 
what. She loves to be alone, walking in the fields and 
groves, and seems to have some one invisible always con- 
versing with her." 

Almost every element of worship is contained in this 
description. First, we have a young human being emo- 
tionally conscious of the presence of God, who in some 
way or other directly but invisibly comes to her. Secondly, 
we have her attention so fixed on the adoration of God 
that she hardly cares for anything except to meditate 
upon Him. Thirdly, as the result of this worshipful ap- 
proach to religious reality, we have the profound peace 
and harmony, the summum bonum of existence, coupled 
with strong moral purpose which characterize her life. 
Here, then, is evidently the unification of consciousness in 
happy awe and the control of destiny through meditation 
upon infinite matters, that is, through reverent contem- 
plation of God. Is it not one of those ironies of history 
wherewith fate is forever mocking and teasing the hu- 
man spirit, that the grandson of this lady and of Jona- 
than Edwards should have been Aaron Burr ? 

Clearly, then, the end of worship is to present to the 
mind, through the imagination, one idea, majestic and 
inclusive. So it presents it chiefly through high and sus- 
tained feeling. Worship proceeds on the understanding 
that one idea, remaining almost unchanged and holding 
the attention for a considerable length of time, so directs 
the emotional processes that thought and action are har- 
monized with it. If one reads the great prayers of the cen- 
turies they indicate, for the most part, an unconscious 
191 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

understanding of this psychology of worship. Take, for 
instance, this noble prayer of Pusey's. 

"Let me not seek out of Thee what I can find only in 
Thee, O Lord, peace and rest and joy and bliss, which 
abide only in thine abiding joy. Lift up my soul above 
the weary round of harassing thoughts, to Thy eternal 
presence. Lift up my soul to the pure, bright, serene, radi- 
ant atmosphere of Thy presence, that there I may breathe 
freely, there repose in Thy love, there be at rest from 
myself and from all things that weary me, and thence 
return arrayed with Thy peace, to do and bear what shall 
please Thee." 

This prayer expresses the essence of worship which is 
the seeking, through the fixation of attention, not the 
delight but rather the peace and purity which can 
only be found in the consciousness of God. This peace is 
the necessary outcome of the indwelling presence. It en- 
sues when man experiences the radiant atmosphere of the 
divine communion. 

The same clear expression of worship is found in 
another familiar and noble prayer, that of Johann Arndt. 
Here, too, are phrases descriptive of a unified conscious- 
ness induced by reverent loyalty. 

"Ah, Lord, to whom all hearts are open, Thou canst 
govern the vessel of my soul far better than can I. Arise,, 
O Lord, and command the stormy wind and the troubled 
sea of my heart to be still, and at peace in Thee, that I 
may look up to Thee undisturbed and abide in union with 
Thee, my Lord. Let me not be carried hither and thither 
by wandering thoughts, but forgetting all else let me see 
and hear Thee. Renew my spirit, kindle in me Thy light 
that it may shine w r ithin me, and my heart burn in love 
and adoration for Thee. Let Thy Holy Spirit dwell in me 
192 



CHIEF APPROACH TO TRANSCENDENCE 

continually, and make me Thy temple and sanctuary, and 
fill me with divine love and life and light, with devout 
and heavenly thoughts, with comfort and strength, with 
joy and peace." 

Thus here one sees in the high contemplation of a 
transcendent God the subduing and elevating of the hu- 
man will, the restoration and composure of the moral 
life. Finally, in a prayer of St. Anselm's there is a sort 
of analysis of the process of worship. 

"O God, Thou art life, wisdom, truth, bounty and 
blessedness, the eternal, the only true Good. My God and 
my Lord, Thou art my hope and my heart's joy. I confess 
with thanksgiving that Thou hast made me in Thine 
image, that I may direct all my thoughts to Thee and 
love Thee. Lord, make me to know Thee aright that I 
may more and more love and enjoy and possess Thee.' , 

One cannot conclude these examples of worshipful ex- 
pression without quoting a prayer of Augustine, which 
is, I suppose, the most perfect brief petition in all the 
Christian literature of devotion and which gives the great 
psychologist's perception of the various steps in the unifi- 
cation of the soul with the eternal Spirit through sublime 
emotion. 

"Grant, O God, that we may desire Thee, and desiring 
Thee, seek Thee, and seeking Thee, find Thee, and find- 
ing Thee, be satisfied with Thee forever." 

I think one may see, then, why worship as distinct 
from preaching, or the hearing of preaching, is the first 
necessity of the religious life. It unites us as nothing else 
can do with God the whole and God the transcendent. 
The conception of God is the sum total of human needs 
and desires harmonized, unified, concretely expressed. It 
is the faith of the worshiper that this concept is derived 

193 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

from a real and objective Being in some way correspond- 
ing to it. No one can measure the influence of such an 
idea when it dominates the consciousness of any given 
period, li can create and set going new desires and habits, 
it can tninish and repress old ones, because this idea 
carries, with its transcendent conception, the dynamic 
quality which belongs to the idea of perfect power. But 
this transcendent conception, being essentially of some- 
thing beyond, without and above ourselves can only be 
"realized" through the feeling and the imagination, 
whose province it is to deal with the supersensuous val- 
ues, with the fringes of understanding, with the farthest 
bounds of knowledge. These make the springboard, so to 
speak, from which man dares to launch himself into that 
sea of the infinite, which we can neither understand nor 
measure, but which nevertheless we may perceive and 
feel, which in some sense we know to be there. 

So, if we deal first with worship, we are merely be- 
ginning at the beginning and starting at the bottom. And, 
in the light of this observation, it is appalling to survey 
the non-liturgical churches today and see the place that 
public devotion holds in them. It is not too much, I think, 
to speak of the collapse of worship in Protestant com- 
munities. No better evidence of this need be sought than 
in the nature of the present attempts to reinstate it. They 
have a naivete, an incongruity, that can only be explained 
on the assumption of their impoverished background. 

This situation shows first in the heterogeneous char- 
acter of our experiments. We are continually printing on 
our churches' calendars what we usually call "programs," 
but which are meant to be orders of worship. We are 
also forever changing them. There is nothing inevitable 
about their order ; they have no intelligible, self-verify- 
194 



CHIEF APPROACH TO TRANSCENDENCE 

ing procedure. Anthems are inserted here and there with- 
out any sense of the progression or of the psychology of 
worship. Glorias are sung sometimes with the congrega- 
tion standing up and sometimes while they are sitting 
down. There is no lectionary to determine a comprehen- 
sive and orderly reading of Scripture, not much sequence 
of thought or progress of devotion either in the read or 
the extempore prayers. There is no uniformity of pos- 
ture. There are two historic attitudes of reverence when 
men are addressing the Almighty. They are the standing 
upon one's feet or the falling upon one's knees. For the 
most part we neither stand nor kneel; we usually loll. 
Some of us compromise by bending forward to the limit- 
ing of our breath and the discomfort of our digestion. It 
is too little inducive to physical ease or perhaps too derog- 
atory to our dignity to kneel before the Lord our Maker. 
All this seems too much like the efforts of those who 
have forgotten what worship really is and are trying to 
find for it some comfortable or attractive substitute. 

Second : we show our inexperience by betraying the 
confusion of aesthetic and ethical values as we strive for 
variety and entertainment in church services ; we build 
them around wonder and admiration, not around rever- 
ence and awe. But we are mistaken if we suppose that 
men chiefly desire to be pleasantly entertained or extraor- 
dinarily delighted when they go into a church. They 
go there because they desire to enter a Holy Presence ; 
they want to approach One before whom they can be still 
and know that He is God. All "enrichments" of a service 
injected into it here and there, designed to make it more 
attractive, to add color and variety, to arrest the attention 
of the senses are, as ends, beside the point, and our de- 
pendence upon them indicates the unhappy state of wor- 

195 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

ship in our day. That we do thus make our professional 
music an end in itself is evident from our blatant way of 
advertising it. In the same way we advertise sermon 
themes, usually intended to startle the pious and provoke 
the ungodly. We want to arouse curiosity, social or politi- 
cal interest, to achieve some secular reaction. We don't 
advertise that tomorrow in our church there is to be a 
public worship of God, and that everything that we are 
going to do will be in the awe-struck sense that He is 
there. We are afraid that nobody would come if we 
merely did that ! 

What infidels we are ! Why are we surprised that the 
world is passing us by ? We say and we sing a great many 
things which it is incredible to suppose we would address 
to God if we really thought He were present. Yet an- 
thems and congregational singing are either a sacrifice 
solemnly and joyously offered to God or else all the sing- 
ing is less, and worse, than nothing in a church service. 
But how often sentimental and restless music, making 
not for restraint and reverence, not for the subduing of 
mind and heart but for the expression of those expansive 
and egotistical moods which are of the essence of roman- 
tic singing, is what we employ. There is a great deal of 
truly religious music, austere in tone, breathing restraint 
and reverence, quietly written. The anthems of Pales- 
trina, Anerio, Yiadana, Vittoria among the Italians ; of 
Bach, Haydn, Handel, Mozart among the Germans ; and 
of Tallis, Gibbons and Purcell among the English, are all 
of the truly devout order. Yet how seldom are the works 
of such men heard in our churches, even where they em- 
ploy professional singers at substantial salaries. We are 
everywhere now trying to give our churches splendid and 
impressive physical accessories, making the architecture 
196 



CHIEF APPROACH TO TRANSCENDENCE 

more and more stately and the pews more and more com- 
fortable ! Thus we attempt an amalgam of a mediaeval 
house of worship with an American domestic interior, 
adoring God at our ease, worshiping Him in armchairs, 
offering prostration of the spirit, so far as it can be 
achieved along with indolence of the body. 

So we advertise and concertize and have silver vases 
and costly flowers and conventional ecclesiastical furni- 
ture. But we still hold a "small-and-early" in the vestibule 
before service and a "five o'clock" in the chapel after- 
ward. Sunday morning church is a this-world function 
with a pietized gossip and a decorous sort of sociable 
with an intellectual fillip thrown in. Thus we try to make 
our services attractive to the secular instincts, the non-re- 
ligious things, in man's nature. We try to get him into the 
church by saying, "You will find here what you find else- 
where." It's rather illogical. The church stands for some- 
thing different. We say, "You will like to come and be 
one of us because we are not different." The answer is, 
"I can get the things of this world better in the world, 
where they belong, than with you." Thus we have nat- 
uralized our very offices of devotion ! Hence the attempts 
to revive worship are incongruous and inconsistent. 
Hence they have that sentimental and accidental char- 
acter which is the sign of the amateur. They do not bring 
us very near to the heavenly country. It might be well to 
remember that the servant of Jahweh doth not cry nor 
lift up his voice nor cause it to be heard in the streets. 

Now, there are many reasons for this anomalous situa- 
tion. One of them is our inheritance of a deep-rooted 
Puritan distrust of a liturgical service. That distrust is 
today a fetish and therefore much more potent that it was 
when it was a reason. Puritanism was born in the Ref- 
197 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

ormation ; it came out from the Roman church, where 
worship was regarded as an end in itself. To Catholic 
believers worship is a contribution to God, pleasing to 
Him apart from any effect it may have on the worshiper. 
Such a theory of it is, of course, open to grave abuse. 
Sometimes it led to indifference as to the effect of the 
worship upon the moral character of the communicant, 
so that worship could be used, not to conquer evil, but to 
make up for it. and thus sin became as safe as it was easy. 
Inevitably also such a theory of worship often degen- 
erated into an utter formalism which made hyprocrisy 
and unreality patent, until the hoc est corpus of the mass 
became the hocus-pocus of the scoffer. 

Here is a reason, once valid because moral, for our 
present situation. Yet it must be confessed that again, as 
so often, we are doing what the Germans call "throwing 
out the baby with the bath," namely, repudiating a defect 
or the perversion of an excellence and, in so doing, throw- 
ing away that excellence itself. It is clear that no Protes- 
tant is ever tempted today to consider worship as its own 
reason and its own end. We are, in a sense, utilitarian 
ritualists. Worship to us is as valuable as it is valid be- 
cause it is the chief avenue of spiritual insight, a chief 
means of awakening penitence, obtaining forgiveness, 
growing in grace and love. These are the ultimates ; these 
are pleasing to God. 

A second reason, however, for our situation is not ethi- 
cal and essential, but economic and accidental. Our fa- 
thers' communities were a slender chain of frontier 
settlements, separated from an ancient civilization by an 
unknown and dangerous sea on the one hand, menaced by 
all the perils of a virgin wilderness upon the other. All 
their life was simple to the point of bareness ; austere, 
198 



CHIEF APPROACH TO TRANSCENDENCE 

reduced to the most elemental necessities. Inevitably the 
order of their worship corresponded to the order of their 
society. It is certain, I think, that the white meeting-house 
with its naked dignity, the old service with its heroic 
simplicity, conveyed to the primitive society which pro- 
duced them elements both of high formality and con- 
scious reverence which they could not possibly offer to 
our luxurious, sophisticated and wealthy age. 

Is it not a dangerous thing to have brought an ever in- 
creasing formality and recognition of a developed and 
sophisticated community into our social and intellectual 
life but to have allowed our religious expression to re- 
main so anachronistic? Largely for social and economic 
reasons we send most of our young men and young women 
to college. There we deliberately cultivate in them the per- 
ception of beauty, the sense of form, various expressions 
of the imaginative life. But how much has our average 
non-liturgical service to offer to their critically trained 
perceptions? Our church habits are pretty largely the 
transfer into the sanctuary of the hearty conventions of 
middle-class family life. The relations in life which are 
precious to such youth, the intimate, the mystical and 
subtle ones, get small recognition or expression. A hun- 
dred agencies outside the church are stimulating in the 
best boys and girls of the present generation fine sensi- 
bilities, critical standards, the higher hungers. Our ser- 
vices, chiefly instructive and didactic, informal and easy 
in character, irritate them and make them feel like trucu- 
lent or uncomfortable misfits. 

A third reason for the lack of corporate or public of- 
fices of devotion in our services lies in the intellectual 
character of the Protestant centuries. We have seen how 
they have been centuries of individualism. Character has 
199 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

been conceived of as largely a personal affair expressed 
in persona] relationships. The believer was like Christian 
in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. He started for the 
Heavenly Country because he was determined to save 
his own soul. When he realized that he was living in the 
City of Destruction it did not occur to him that, as a 
good man, he must identify his fate with it. On the con- 
trary, he deserted wife and children with all possible ex- 
pedition and got him out and went along through the 
Slough of Despond, up to the narrow gate, to start on 
the way of life. It was a chief glory of mediaeval society 
that it was based upon corporate relationships. Its cathe- 
drals were possible because they were the common house 
of God for every element of the community. Family and 
class and state were dominant factors then. But we have 
seen how, in the Renaissance and the Romantic Move- 
ment, individualism supplanted these values. Now, Prot- 
estantism was contemporary with that new movement, 
indeed, a part of it. Its growing egotism and the colossal 
egotism of the modern world form a prime cause for the 
impoverishment of worship in Protestant churches. 

And so this brings us, then, to the real reason for our 
devotional impotence, the one to which we referred in 
the opening sentences of the chapter. It is essentially due 
to the character of the regulative ideas of our age. It lies 
in that world view whose expressions in literature, phi- 
losophy and social organizations we have been reviewing 
in these pages. The partial notion of God which our 
age has unconsciously made the substitute for a com- 
prehensive understanding of Him is essentially to blame. 
For since the contemporary doctrine is of His imma- 
nence, it therefore follows that it is chiefly through ob- 
servation of the natural world and by interpretation of 
200 



CHIEF APPROACH TO TRANSCENDENCE 

contemporary events that men will approach Him if they 
come to Him at all. Moreover, our humanism, in empha- 
sizing the individual and exalting his self-sufficiency, has 
so far made the mood of worship alien and the need of it 
superfluous. The overemphasis upon preaching, the gen- 
eral passion of this generation for talk and then more 
talk, and then endless talk, is perfectly intelligible in view 
of the regulative ideas of this generation. It seeks its un- 
derstanding of the world chiefly in terms of natural and 
tangible phenomena and chiefly by means either of criti- 
cal observation or of analytic reasoning. Hence preach- 
ing, especially that sort which looks for the divine princi- 
ple in contemporary events, has been to the fore. But 
worship, which finds the divine principle in something 
more and other than contemporary events — which indeed 
does not look outward to "events" at all — has been 
thrown into the background. 

It seems to me clear, then, that if we are to emphasize 
the transcendent elements in religion; if they represent, 
as we have been contending, the central elements of the 
religious experience, its creative factors, then the re- 
vival of worship will be a prime step in creating a more 
truly spiritual society. I am convinced that a homilizing 
church belongs to a secularizing age. One cannot forget 
that the ultimate, I do not say the only, reason for the 
founding of the non-liturgical churches was the rise of 
humanism. One cannot fail to see the connection between 
humanistic doctrine and moralistic preaching, or between 
the naturalism of the moment and the mechanicalizing of 
the church. "The Christian congregation," said Luther, 
child of the humanistic movement, "should never assem- 
ble except the word of God be preached." "In other coun- 
tries," says old Isaac Taylor, "the bell calls people to wor- 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

ship; in Scotland it calls them to a preachment." And one 
remembers the justice of Charles Kingsley's fling at the 
Dissenters that they were "creatures who went to church 
to hear sermons!" It would seem evident, then, that a re- 
newal of worship would he the logical accompaniment of 
a return to distinctly religious values in society and 
church. 

What can we do, then, better for an age of paganism 
than to cultivate this transcendent consciousness? Direct 
men away from Cod the universal and impersonal to God 
the particular and intimate. Nothing is more needed for 
our age than to insist upon the truth that there are both 
common and uncommon, both secular and sacred worlds; 
that these are not contradictor)- ; that they are com- 
plementary ; that they are not identical. It is the 
church's business to insist that men must live in the 
world of the sacred, the uncommon, the particular, in or- 
der to be able to surmount and endure the secular, the 
common and the universal. It is her business to insist that 
through worship all this can be accomplished. But can 
worship be taught? Is not the devotee, like the poet or the 
lover or any other genius, born and not made? Well, 
whether it can be taught or not, it at least can be culti- 
vated and developed, and there are three very practical 
ways in which this cultivation can be brought about. 

One of them is by paying intelligent attention to the 
physical surroundings of the worshiper. The assembly 
room for worship obviously should not be used for other 
purposes ; all its suggestions and associations should be 
of one sort and that sort the highest. Quite aside from 
the question of taste, it is psychologically indefensible to 
use the same building, and especially the same room in the 
building, for concerts, for picture shows, for worship. 



CHIEF APPROACH TO TRANSCENDENCE 

Here we at once create a distracted consciousness ; we 
dissipate attention ; we deliberately make it harder for 
men and women to focus upon one, and that the most 
difficult, if the most precious, mood. 

For the same reason, the physical form of the room 
should be one that does not suggest either the concert 
hall or the playhouse, but suggests rather a long and un- 
broken ecclesiastical tradition. Until the cinema was in- 
troduced into worship, we were vastly improving in these 
respects, but now we are turning the morning temple into 
an evening showhouse. I think we evince a most imperti- 
nent familiarity with the house of God ! And too often 
the church is planned so that it has no privacies or re- 
cesses, but a hideous publicity pervades its every part. 
We adorn it with stenciled frescoes of the same patterns 
which we see in hotel lobbies and clubs ; we hang up maps 
behind the reading desk; we clutter up its platform with 
grand pianos. 

It is a mere matter of good taste and good psychology 
to begin our preparation for a ministry of worship by 
changing all this. There should be nothing in color or 
ornament which arouses the restless mood or distracts 
the eye. Severe and simple walls, restrained and devout 
figures in glass windows, are only to be tolerated. De- 
scriptive windows, attempting in a most untractable me- 
dium a sort of naive realism, are equally an aesthetic and 
an ecclesiastical offense. Figures of saints or great re- 
ligious personages should be typical, impersonal, sym- 
bolic, not too much like this world and the things of it. 
There is a whole school of modern window glass dis- 
tinguished by its opulence and its realism. It ought to be 
banished from houses of worship. Since it is the object 
of worship to fix the attention upon one thing and that 
203 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

thing the highest, the room where worship is held should 
have its own central object. It may be the Bible, idealized 
as the word of God ; it may be the altar on which stands 
the Cross of the eternal sacrifice. But no church ought 
to be without one fixed point to which the eye of the 
body is insensibly drawn, thereby making it easier to fol- 
low it with the attention of the mind and the wishes of 
the heart. At the best, our Protestant ecclesiastical build- 
ings are all empty ! There are meeting-houses, not tem- 
ples ; assembly rooms, not shrines. There is apparently no 
sense in which we are willing to acknowledge that the 
Presence is on their altar. Bill at least the attention of the 
worshiper within them may focus around some symbol 
of that Presence, may be fixed on some outward sign 
which will help the inward grace. 

But second : our chief concern naturally must be with 
the content of the service of worship itself, not with its 
.physical surroundings. And here then are two things 
which may be said. First, any formal order of worship 
should be historic ; it should have its roots deep in the 
past ; whatever else is true of a service of worship it 
ought not to suggest that it has been uncoupled from the 
rest of time and allowed to run wild. Now, this means 
that an order of worship, basing itself on the devotion of 
the ages, will use to some extent their forms. I do not see 
how anyone would wish to undertake to lead the same 
company of people week by week in divine worship with- 
out availing himself of the help of written prayers, great 
litanies, to strengthen and complement the spontaneous 
offices of devotion. There is something almost incredible 
to me in the assumption that one man can, supposedly un- 
aided, lead a congregation in the emotional expression of 
its deepest life and desires without any assistance from 
204 



CHIEF APPROACH TO TRANSCENDENCE 

the great sacramentaries and liturgies of the past. Chris- 
tian literature is rich with a great body of collects, 
thanksgivings, confessions, various special petitions, 
which gather up the love and tears, the vision and the 
anguish of many generations. These, with their phrases 
made unspeakably precious with immemorial association, 
with their subtle fitting of phrase to insight, of expression 
to need, born of long centuries of experiment and aspira- 
tion, can do for a congregation what no man alone can 
ever hope to accomplish. The well of human needs and 
desires is so deep that, without these aids, we have not 
much to draw with, no plummet wherewith to sound its 
dark and hidden depths. 

I doubt if we can overestimate the importance of giv- 
ing this sense of continuity in petitions, of linking up the 
prayer of the moment and the worship of the day with 
the whole ageless process so that it seems a part of that 
volume of human life forever ascending unto the eternal 
spirit, just as the gray plume of smoke from the sacrifice 
ever curled upward morning by morning and night by 
night from the altar of the temple under the blue Syrian 
sky. We cannot easily give this sense of continuity, this 
prestige of antiquity, this resting back on a great body 
of experience, unless we know and use the language and 
the phrases of our fathers. It is to the God who hath 
been our dwelling place in all generations, that we pray ; 
to Him who in days of old was a pillar of cloud by day 
and of fire by night to His faithful children ; to the One 
who is the Ancient of Days, Infinite Watcher of the sons 
of men. Only by acquaintance with the phrases, the pe- 
titions of the past, and only by a liberal use of them can 
we give background and dignity, or anything approach- 
ing variety and completeness, to our own public expres- 
205 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

sion and interpretation of the devotional life. If anyone 
objects to this use of formal prayers on the ground of 
their formality, let him remember that we. too, are for- 
mal, only we, alas, have made a cult of formlessness. It 
would surprise the average minister to know the well- 
worn road which his supposedly spontaneous and extem- 
pore devotions follow. Phrase after phrase following in 
the same order of ideas, and with the same pitiably limited 
vocabulary, appear week by week in them. How much 
better to enrich this painfully individualistic formalism 
with something of the corporate glories of the whole 
body of Christian believers. 

Hut, second: there should be also the principle of im- 
mediacy in the service, room for the expression of indi- 
vidual needs and desires and for reference to the imme- 
diate and local circumstances of the believer. A church 
in which there is no spontaneous and extempore prayer, 
which only harked backward to the past, might build the 
tombs of the prophets but it might also stifle new voices 
for a new age. But extempore prayer should not be 
impromptu prayer. It should have coherence, dignity, pro- 
gression. The spirit should have been humbly and pains- 
takingly prepared for it so that sincere and ardent feel- 
ing may wing and vitalize its words. The great prayers 
of the ages, known of all the worshipers, perhaps re- 
peated by them all together, tie in the individual soul to 
the great mass of humanity and it moves on, with its 
fellows, toward salvation as majestically and steadily 
as great rivers flow/. The extempore and silent prayer, 
not unpremeditated but still the unformed outpouring of 
the individual heart, gives each man the consciousness of 
standing naked and alone before his God. Both these, the 
corporate and the separate elements of worships are vi- 
206 



CHIEF APPROACH TO TRANSCENDENCE 

tal; there should be a place for each in every true order 
of worship. 

But, of course, the final thing to say is the first thing. 
Whatever may be the means that worship employs, its 
purpose must be to make and keep the church a place of 
repose, to induce constantly the life of relinquishment to 
God, of reverence and meditation. And this it will do as 
it seeks to draw men up to the "otherness," the majesty, 
the aloofness, the transcendence of the Almighty. To this 
end I would use whatever outward aids time and experi- 
ence have shown will strengthen and deepen the spiritual 
understanding. I should not fear to use the cross, the 
sacraments, the kneeling posture, the great picture, the 
carving, the recitation of prayers and hymns, not alone to 
intensify this sense in the believer but equally to create 
it in the non-believer. The external world moulds the in- 
ternal, even as the internal makes the external. If these 
things mean little in the beginning, there is still truth in 
the assertion of the devotee that if you practice them 
they will begin to mean something to you. This is not 
merely that a meaning will be self-induced. It is more 
than that. They will put us in the volitional attitude, the 
emotional mood, where the meaning is able to penetrate. 
Just as all the world acknowledges that there is an essen- 
tial connection between good manners and good morals, 
between military discipline and physical courage, so there 
is a connection between a devotional service and the gifts 
of the spiritual life. Such a service not merely strength- 
ens belief in the High and Holy One, it has a real office 
in creating, in making possible, that belief itself. 

We shall sum it all up if we say in one word that the 
offices of devotion emphasize the cosmic character of re- 
ligion. They take us out of the world of moral theism 
207 



TREACHING AND PAGANISM 

into the world of a universal theism. They draw us away 
from religion in action to religion in itself ; they give us, 
not the God of this world, but the God who is from ever- 
lasting to everlasting, to whom a thousand years are but 
as yesterday when it is past and as a watch in the 
night. Thus they help us to make for ourselves an interior 
refuge into whose precincts no eye may look, into whose 
life no other soul may venture. In that refuge we can be 
still and know that He is God. There we can eat the 
meat which the world knoweth not of, there have peace 
with Him. It is in these central solitudes, induced by wor- 
ship, that the vision is clarified, the perspective corrected, 
the vital forces recharged. Those who possess them are 
transmitters of such heavenly messages; they issue from 
them as rivers pour from undiminished mountain 
streams. Does the world's sin and pain and weakness 
come and empty itself into the broad current of these de- 
vout lives? Then their fearless onsweeping forces gather 
it all up, carry it on, cleanse and purify it in the process. 
Over such lives the things of this world have no power. 
They are kept secretly from them all in His pavilion 
where there is no strife of tongues. 



208 



CHAPTER EIGHT 
Worship and the Discipline of Doctrine 

V 

IF one were to ask any sermon-taster of our genera- 
tion what is the prevailing type of discourse among 
the better-known preachers of the day, he would 
probably answer, "The expository." Expository preach- 
ing has had a notable revival in the last three decades, es- 
pecially among liberal preachers ; that is, among those 
who like ourselves have discarded scholastic theologies, 
turned to the ethical aspects of religion for our chief in- 
terests and accepted the modern view of the Bible. To 
be sure, it is not the same sort of expository preaching 
which made the Scottish pulpit of the nineteenth century 
famous. It -is not the detailed exposition of each word 
and clause, almost of each comma, which marks the 
mingled insight and literalism of a Chalmers, an Alexan- 
der Maclaren, a Taylor of the Broadway Tabernacle. 
For that assumed a verbally inspired and hence an in- 
errant Scripture ; it dealt with the literature of the Old 
and New Testaments as being divine revelations. The 
new expository preaching proceeds from almost an op- 
posite point of view. It deals with this literature as be^ 
ing a transcript of human experience. Its method is di- 
rect and simple and, within sharp limits, very effective. 
The introduction to one of these modern expository ser- 
mons would run about as follows: 

"I suppose that what has given to the Old and New 
209 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 
Testament Scriptures their enduring hold over the minds 
and consciences of men has been their extraordinary hu- 
manity. The}- contain so many vivid and accurate reci- 
tals of typical human experience, portrayed with self- 
verifying insight and interpreted with consummate 
understanding of the issues of the heart. And since it is 
true, as Goethe said, 'That while mankind is always pro- 
gressing man himself remains ever the same,' and 
we are not essentially different from the folk who lived 
a hundred generations ago under the sunny Palestinian 
sky. we read these ancient tales and find in them a mirror 
which reflects the lineaments of our own time. For in- 
stance. ..." 

Then the sermonizer proceeds to relate some famous 
Bible story, resolving its naive Semitic theophanies, its 
pictorial narration, its primitive morality, into the terms 
of contemporary ethical or political or economic princi- 
ples. Take, for instance, the account of the miracle of 
Moses and the Burning Bush. The preacher will point out 
that Moses saw a bush that burned and burned and that, 
unlike most furze bushes of those upland pastures which 
were ignited by the hot Syrian sun, was not consumed. 
It was this enduring quality of the bush that interested 
him. Thus Moses showed the first characteristic of 
genius, namely, capacity for accurate and discriminating 
observation. And he coupled this with the scientific habit 
of mind. For he said, "I will now turn aside and see 
why!" Thus did he propose to pierce behind the event to 
the cause of the event, behind the movement to the princi- 
ple of the movement. What a modern man this Moses 
was ! It seems almost too good to be true ! 

But as yet we have merely scratched the surface of the 
story. For he took his shoes from off his feet when he 



WORSHIP AND DISCIPLINE OF DOCTRINE 

inspected this new phenomenon, feeling instinctively that 
he was on holy ground. Thus there mingled with his 
scientific curiosity the second great quality of genius, 
which is reverence. There was no complacency here but 
an approach to life at once eager and humble ; keen yet 
teachable and mild. And now behold what happens! As 
a result of this combination of qualities there came to 
Moses the vision of what he might do to lead his op- 
pressed countrymen out of their industrial bondage. 
Whereupon he displayed the typical human reaction and 
cried, "Who am I, that I should go unto Pharoah or that 
I should lead the children of Israel out of Egypt!" My 
brother Aaron, who is an eloquent person — and as it 
turned out later also a specious one — is far better suited 
for this undertaking. Thus he endeavored to evade the 
task and cried, "Let someone else do it!" Having thus 
expounded the word of God ( !) the sermon proceeds to 
its final division in the application of this shrewd and 
practical wisdom to some current event or parochial sit- 
uation. 

aow, such preaching is indubitably effective and not 
lly illegitimate. Its technique is easily acquired. It 
es us realize that the early Church Fathers, who dis- 
played a truly appalling ingenuity in allegorizing the Old 
Testament and who found "types" of Christ and His 
Church in frankly sensual Oriental wedding songs, 
have many sturdy descendants among us to this very 
hour! Such preaching gives picturesqueness and color,. it 
provides the necessary sugar coating to the large pill of 
practical and ethical exhortation. To be sure, it does not 
sound like the preaching of our fathers. The old sermon 
titles — "Suffering with Christ that we may be also glori- 
fied with Him," for instance — seem very far away from 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

it. Nor is it to be supposed that this is what its author 
intended the story we have been using to convey nor that 
these were the reactions that it aroused in the breasts of 
its original hearers. But as the sermonizer would doubt- 
less go on to remark, there is a certain universal quality 
in all great literature, and genius builds better than it 
knows, and so each man can draw his own water of re- 
freshment from these great wells of the past. And in- 
deed nothing is more amazing or disconcerting than the 
mutually exclusive notions, the apparently opposing 
truths, which can be educed by this method, from one and 
the same passage of Scripture! There is scarcely a chap- 
ter in all the Old Testament, and to a less degree in the 
New Testament, which may not be thus ingeniously 
transmogrified to meet almost any homiletical emer- 
gency. 

Now, I may as well confess that I have preached this 
kind of sermon lo ! these many years ad infinitum and I 
doubt not ad nauseam. We have all used in this way the 
flaming rhetoric of the Hebrew prophets until we think 
of them chiefly as indicters of a social order. They were 
not chiefly this but something quite different and more 
valuable, namely, religious geniuses. First-rate preaching 
would deal with Amos as the pioneer in ethical monothe- 
ism, with Hosea as the first poet of the divine grace, with 
Jeremiah as the herald of the possibility of each man's 
separate and personal communion with the living God. 
But, of course, such religious preaching, dealing with 
great doctrines of faith, would have a kind of large re- 
moteness about it ; it would pay very little attention to the 
incidents of the story, and indeed, would tend to be 
hardly expository at all, but rather speculative and doc- 
trinal. 



WORSHIP AND DISCIPLINE OF DOCTRINE 

And that brings us to the theme of this final discus- 
sion. For I am one of those who believe that great c \- X/ 
preaching is doctrinal preaching and that it is particu- 
larly needed at this hour. The comparative neglect of the 
New Testament in favor of the Old in contemporary 
preaching ; the use and nature of the expository method — 
no less than the unworshipful character of our services — 
appear to me to offer a final and conclusive proof of 
the unreligious overhumanistic emphases of our inter- 
pretation of religion. And if we are to have a religious 
revival, then it seems to me worshipful services must be 
accompanied by speculative preaching and I doubt if the 
one can be nobly maintained without the other. For we 
saw that worship is the direct experience of the Absolute 
through high and concentrated feeling. Even so specula- 
tive and, in general, doctrinal preaching is the same return 
to first principles and to ultimate values in the realm of 
ideas. It turns away from the immediate, the practical, 
the relative to the final and absolute in the domain of 
thought. 

Now, obviously, then, devout services and doctrinal 
preaching should go together. No high and persistent v 
emotions can be maintained without clear thinking to 
nourish and steady them. There is in doctrinal preaching 
a certain indifference to immediate issues ; to detailed ap- 
plications. It deals, by its nature, with comprehensive and 
abstract rather than local and concrete thinking ; with in- 
clusive feeling, transcendent aspiration. It does not try 
to pietize the ordinary, commercial and domestic affairs 
of men. Instead it deals with the highest questions and 
perceptions of human life; argues from those sublime 
hypotheses which are the very subsoil of the religious 
temperament and understanding. It deals with those as- 

213 



PREACHING AX D PAGANISM 

pects of human life which indeed include, but include be- 
cause they transcend, the commercial and domestic, the 
professional and political affairs of daily living. We have 
been insisting in these chapters that it is that portion of 
human need and experience which lies between the know- 
able and the unknowable with which it is the preacher's 
chief province to deal. Doctrinal preaching endeavors to 
give form and relations to its intuitions and high desires, 
its unattainable longings and insights. There is a native' 
alliance between the doctrine of Immanence and exposi- 
tory preaching. For the office of both is to give us the 
God of this world in the affairs of the moment. There is 
a native alliance- between expository preaching and hu- 
manism which very largely accounts for the latter's pop- 
ularity. For expository preaching, as at present practiced, 
deals mostly with ethical and practical issues, with the 
setting of the house of this world in order. There is also 
a native and majestic alliance between the idea of tran- 
scendence and doctrinal preaching and between the facts 
of the religious experience and the content of speculative 
philosophy. Not pragmatism but pure metaphysics is the 
native language of the mind when it moves in the spirit- 
ual world. 

But I am aware that already I have lost my reader's 
sympathy. You do not desire to preach doctrinal sermons 
and w r hile you may read with amiable patience and faintly 
smiling complacency this discussion, you have no inten- 
tion of following its advice. We tend to think that doc- 
trinal sermons are outmoded — old-fashioned and unpopu- 
lar — and we dread as we dread few other things, not be- 
ing up to date. Besides, doctrinal preaching offers little of 
that opportunity which is found in expository and yet 
more in topical preaching for exploiting our own per- 
214 



WORSHIP AND DISCIPLINE OF DOCTRINE 

sonalities. Some of us are young. It is merely a polite way 
of saying that we are egotistical. We know in our secret 
heart of hearts that the main thing that we have to give 
the world is our own new, fresh selves with their cor- 
rected and arresting understanding of the world. We are 
modestly yet eagerly ready to bestow that gift of ours 
upon the waiting congregation. One of the few compen- 
sations of growing old is that, as the hot inner fires burn 
lower, this self-absorption lessens and we become disin- 
terested and judicial observers of life and find so much 
pleasure in other people's successes and so much wisdom 
in other folk's ideas. But not so for youth ; it isn't what 
the past or the collective mind and heart have formu- 
lated : it's what you've got to say that interests you. 
Hence it is probably true that doctrinal preaching, in the 
very nature of things, makes no strong appeal to men 
who are beginning the ministry. 

But there are other objections which are more serious, 
because inherent in the very genius of doctrinal preach- 
ing itself. First: such preaching is more or less remote 
from contemporary and practical issues. It deals with 
thought, not actions; understanding rather than efficiency ; 
principles rather than applications. It moves among 
the basic concepts of the religious life ; deals with matters 
beyond and above and without the tumultuous issues of 
the moment. So it follows that doctrinal preaching has an 
air of detachment, almost of seclusion from the world ; 
the preacher brings his message from some pale world of 
ideas to this quick world of action. And we are afraid 
of this detachment, the abstract and theoretical nature of 
the thinker's sermon. 

I think the fear is not well grounded. What is the use 
of preaching social service to the almost total neglect of 

215 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

setting forth the intellectual and emotional concept of the 
servant? It is the quality of the doer which determines 
the value of the deed. Why keep on insisting upon being 
good if our hearers have never been carefully instructed 
in the nature and the sanctions of goodness? Has not the 
trouble with most of our political and moral reform been 
that we have had a passion for it but very little science 
of it? How can we know the ways of godliness if we 
take God Himself for granted? No: our chief business, as 
preachers, is to preach the content rather than the appli- 
cation of the truth. Not many people are interested in 
trying to find the substance of the truth. It is hated as im- 
practical by the multitude of the impatient and despised as 
eM-fashioned by the get-saved-quick reformers. Never- 
theless we must find out the distinctions between divine 
and human, right and wrong, and why they are what they 
are, and what is the good of it all. There is no more valu- 
able service which the preacher can render his community 
than to deliberately seclude himself from continual con- 
tact with immediate issues and dwell on the eternal veri- 
ties. When Darwin published The Descent of Man at the 
end of the Franco-Prussian War, the London Times took 
him severely to task for his absorption in purely scientific 
interests and hypothetical issues. "When the foundations 
of property and the established order were threatened 
with the fires of the Paris Commune ; when the Tuileries 
were burning — how could a British subject be occupying 
himself with speculations in natural science in no wise 
calculated to bring aid or comfort to those who had a 
stake in the country !" Well, few of us imagine today that 
Darwin would have been wise to have exchanged the se- 
clusion and the impractical hours of the study for the 
office or the camp, the market or the street. 
216 



WORSHIP AND DISCIPLINE OF DOCTRINE 

Yet the same fear of occupying ourselves with central 
and abstract matters still obsesses us. At the Quadrennial 
Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church held re- 
cently at Des Moines, thirty-four bishops submitted an 
address in which they said among other things : "Of 
course, the church must stand in unflinching, uncompro- 
mising denunciation of all violations of laws, against all 
murderous child labor, all foul sweat shops, all unsafe 
mines, all deadly tenements, all excessive hours for those 
who toil, all profligate luxuries, all standards of wage and 
life below the living standard, all unfairness and harsh- 
ness of conditions, all brutal exactions, whether of the 
employer or union, all overlordships, whether of capital 
or labor, all godless profiteering, whether in food, cloth- 
ing, profits or wages, against all inhumanity, injustice and 
blighting inequality, against all class-minded men who 
demand special privileges or exceptions on behalf of their 
class." 

These are all vital matters, yet I cannot believe that it 
is the church's chief business thus to turn her energies 
to the problems of the material world. This would be a 
stupendous program, even if complete in itself; as an 
item in a program it becomes almost a reductio ad ab- 
surdum. The Springfield Republican in an editorial com- 
ment upon it said : "It fairly invites the question whether 
the church is not in some danger of trying to do too 
much. The fund of energy available for any human un- 
dertaking is not unlimited ; energy turned in one direction 
must of necessity be withdrawn from another and energy 
diffused in many directions cannot be concentrated. 
Count the adjectives — 'murderous,' 'foul,' 'unsafe,' 
'deadly,' 'excessive,' 'profligate,' 'brutal,' 'godless,' 
'blighting' — does not each involve research, investiga- 
217 



PREACHING .WD PAGANISM 

tion, comparison, analysis, deliberation, a heavy tax upon 
the intellectual resources of the church if any result 
worth having is to be obtained? Can this energy be found 
without subtracting energy from some other sphere?'' 

The gravest problems of the world are not found here. 
They are found in the decline of spiritual understanding, 
the decay of moral standards, the growth of the vindic- 
tive and unforgiving spirit, the lapse from charity, the 
overweening pride of the human heart. With these mat- 
ters the church must chiefly deal; to their spiritual infi- 
delity she must bring a spiritual message; to their poor 
thinking she must bring the wisdom of the eternal. This 
task, preventive not remedial, is her characteristic one. Is 
it not worth while to remember that the great religious 
leaders have generally ignored contemporary social prob- 
lem-? So have the great artists who are closely allied to 
them. Neither William Shakespeare nor Leonardo da 
Vinci were reformers; neither ( '.autama nor the Lord Je- 
sus had much to say about the actual international eco- 
nomic and political readjustments which were as press- 
ing in their day as ours. They were content to preach the 
truth, sure that it. once understood, would set men free. 

But a second reason why we dislike doctrinal preach- 
ing is because we confound it with dogmatic preaching. 
Doctrinal sermons are those which deal with the philoso- 
phy of religion. They expound or defend or relate the 
intellectual statements, the formulae of religion. Such 
discourses differ essentially from dogmatic sermonizing. 
For what is a doctrine? A doctrine is an intellectual for- 
mulation of an experience. Suppose a man receives a new 
influx of moral energy and spiritual insight, through 
reading the Bible, through trying to pray, through loving 
and meditating upon the Lord Jesus. That experience 
218 



WORSHIP AND DISCIPLINE OF DOCTRINE 

isn't a speculative proposition, it isn't a faith or an hy- 
pothesis ; it's a fact. Like the man in the Johannine record 
the believer says, "Whether he be a sinner I know not: 
but one thing I know, that, whereas I was blind, now I 
see." 

Now, let this new experience of moral power and 
spiritual insight express itself, as it normally will, in a 
more holy and more useful life, in the appropriate terms 
of action. There you get that confession of experience 
which we call character. Or let it express itself in the ap- 
propriate emotions of joy and awe and reverence so that, 
like Ray Palmer, the convert writes an immortal hymn, 
or a body of converts like the early church produces the 
Te Deum. There is the confession of experience in wor- 
ship. Or let a man filled with this new life desire to un- 
derstand it; see what its implications are regarding the 
nature of God, the nature of man, the place of Christ in 
the scale of created or uncreated Being. Let him desire 
to thus conserve and interpret that he may transmit this 
new experience. Then he will begin to define it and to 
reduce it, for brevity and clearness, to some abstract and 
compact formula. Thus he will make a confession of ex- 
perience in doctrine. 

Doctrines, then, are not arbitrary but natural, not ac- 
cidental but essential. They are the hypotheses regarding 
the eternal nature of things drawn from the data of our 
moral and spiritual experience. They are to religion just 
what the science of electricity is to a trolley car, or what 
the formula of evolution is to natural science, or what 
the doctrine of the conservation of energy is, or was, to 
physics. Doctrines are signposts ; they are placards, in- 
dex fingers, notices summing up and commending the 
proved essences of religious experience. Two things are 
219 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

always true of sound doctrine. First: it is not considered 
to have primary value ; its worth is in the experience to 
which it witnesses. Second : it is not fixed but flexible and 
progressive. Someone has railed at theology, defining it 
as the history of discarded errors. That is a truth and a 
great compliment and the definition holds good of the 
record of any other science. 

Xow, if doctrines are signposts, dogmas are old and 
now misleading milestones. For what is a dogma? It may 
be one of two things. Usually it is a doctrine that has 
forgotten that it ever had a history; a formula which 
once had authority because it was a genuine interpreta- 
tion of experience but which now is so outmoded in fash- 
ion of thought, or so maladjusted to our present scale of 
values, as to be no longer clearly related to experience and 
is therefore accepted merely on command, or on the pres- 
tige of its antiquity. Or it may be a doctrine promulgated 
ex cathedra, not because religious experience produced it, 
but because ecclesiastical expediencies demand it. Thus, 
to illustrate the first sort of dogma, there was once a doc- 
trine of the Virgin Birth. Men found, as they still do, 
both God and man in Jesus ; they discovered when they 
followed Him their own real humanity and true divinity. 
They tried to explain and formalize the experience and 
made a doctrine which, for the circle of ideas and the 
extent of the factual knowledge of the times, was both 
reasonable and valuable. The experience still remains, 
but the doctrine is no longer psychologically or biologi- 
cally credible. It no longer offers a tenable explanation ; 
it is not a valuable or illuminating interpretation. Hence 
if we hold it at all today, it is either for sentiment or for 
the sake of mere tradition, namely, for reasons other than 
its intellectual usefulness or its inherent intelligibility. So 
220 



WORSHIP AND DISCIPLINE OF DOCTRINE 

held it passes over from doctrine into dogma. Or take, as 
an example of the second sort, the dogma of the Immac- 
ulate Conception, promulgated by Pius IX in the year 
1854, and designed to strengthen the prestige of the Papal 
See among the Catholic powers of Europe and to prolong 
its hold upon its temporal possessions. De Cesare de- 
scribes the promulgation of the dogma as follows: 

"The festival on that day, December 8, 1854, sacred to 
the Virgin, was magnificent. After chanting the Gospel, 
first in Latin, then in Greek, Cardinal Macchi, deacon of 
the Sacred College, together with the senior archbishops 
and bishops present, all approached the Papal throne, 
pronouncing these words in Latin, 'Deign, most Holy Fa- 
ther, to lift your Apostolic voice and pronounce the dog- 
matic Decree of the Immaculate Conception, on account 
of which there will be praise in heaven and rejoicings 
on earth/ The Pope replying, stated that he welcomed the 
wish of the Sacred College, the episcopate, the clergy, and 
declared it was essential first of all to invoke the help of 
the Holy Spirit. So saying he intoned in Veni Creator, 
chanted in chorus by all present. The chant concluded, 
amid a solemn silence Pius IX's finely modulated voice 
read the following Decree : 

" Tt shall be Dogma, that the most Blessed Virgin 
Mary, in the first instant of the Conception, by singular 
privilege and grace of God, in virtue of the merits of Je- 
sus Christ, the Saviour of mankind, was preserved from 
all stain of original sin.' The senior cardinal then prayed 
the Pope to make this Decree public, and, amid the roar 
of cannon from Fort St. Angelo and the festive ringing 
of church bells, the solemn act was accomplished/ M1 Here 
is an assertion regarding Mary's Conception which has 

1 The Last Days of Papal Rome, pp. 127 ff. 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

only the most tenuous connection with religious experi- 
ence and which was pronounced for ecclesiastical and 
political reasons. Here we have dogma at its worst. Here, 
indeed, it is so bad as to resemble many of the current 
political and economic pronunciamentos ! 

Now, nobody wants dogmatic preaching, but there is 
nothing that wc need more than we do doctrinal preach- 
ing and nothing which is more interesting. The speciali- 
zation of knowledge has assigned to the preacher of 
religion a definite sphere. No amount of secondary expert- 
ness in politics or economics or social reform or even 
morals can atone for the abandonment of our own prov- 
ince. We are set to think about and expound religion and 
if we give that up we give up our place in a learned pro- 
fession. Moreover, the new conditions of the modern 
world make doctrine imperative. That world is dis- 
tinguished by its free inquiry, its cultivation of the 
scientific method, its abandonment of obscuranticisms 
and ambiguities. It demands, then, devout and holy think- 
ing from us. Who would deny that the revival of intel- 
lectual authority and leadership in matters of religion is 
terribly needed in our day? Sabatier is right in saying that 
a religion without doctrine is a self-contradictory idea. 
Harnack is not wrong in saying that a Christianity with- 
out it is inconceivable. 

And now I know you are thinking in your hearts, 
Well, what inconsistency this man shows! For a whole 
book he has been insisting on the prime values of imag- 
ination and feeling in religion and now he concludes with 
a plea for the thinker. But it is not so inconsistent as it 
appears. It is just because we do believe that the discov- 
ery, the expression and the rewards of religion lie chiefly 
in the superrational and poetic realms that therefore we 
222 



WORSHIP AND DISCIPLINE OF DOCTRINE 

want this intellectual content to accompany it, not super- 
sede it, as a balancing influence, a steadying force. There 
are grave perils in worshipful services corresponding to 
their supreme values. Mystical preaching has the defects 
of its virtues and too often sinks into that vague senti- 
mentalism which is the perversion of its excellence. How 
insensibly sometimes does high and precious feeling de- 
generate into a sort of religious hysteria ! It needs then 
to be always tested and corrected by clear thinking. 

But we in no way alter our original insistence that in 
our realm as preachers, unlike the scientist's realm of the 
theologians, thought is the handmaid, not the mistress. 
Our great plea, then, for doctrinal preaching is that by 
intellectual grappling with the final and speculative prob- 
lems of religion we do not supersede but feed the emo- 
tional life and do not diminish but focus and steady it. It 
is that you and I may have reserves of feeling — indis- 
pensable to great preaching — sincerity and intensity of 
emotion, that disciplined imagination which is genius, 
that restrained passion which is art, and that our con- 
gregations may have the same, that we must strive for 
intellectual power, must do the preaching that gives 
people something to think about. These are the religious 
and devout reasons why we value intellectual honesty, 
precision of utterance, reserve of statement, logical and 
coherent thinking. 

We are come, then, to the conclusion of our discussions. 
They have been intended to restore a neglected emphasis 
upon the imaginative and transcendent as distinguished 
from the ethical and humanistic aspects of the religious 
life. They have tried to show that the reaching out by 
worship to this "otherness" of God and to the ultimate 
in life is man's deepest hunger and the one we are chiefly 
223 



PREACHING AND PAGANISM 

set to feed. I am sure that the chief ally of the experience 
of the transcendence of God and the cultivation of the 
worshipful faculties in man is to be found in severe and 
speculative thinking. I believe our almost unmixed pas- 
sion for piety, for action, for practical efficiency, betrays 
us. It indicates that we are trying to manufacture effects 
to conceal the absence of causes. We may look for a re- 
ligious revival when men have so meditated upon and 
struggled with the fundamental ideas of religion that they 
feel profoundly its eternal mysteries. 

And finally, we have the best historical grounds for our 
position. Sometimes great religious movements have been 
begun by unlearned and uncritical men like Peter the 
hermit or John Bunyan or Moody. But we must not in- 
fer from this that religious insight is naturally repressed 
by clear thinking or fostered by ignorance. Dr. Francis 
Greenwood Peabody has pointed out that the great re- 
ligious epochs in Christian history are also epochs in the 
history of theology. The Pauline epistles, the Confessions 
of Augustine, the Meditations of Anselm, the Simple 
Method of Hozu to Pray of Luther, the Regula of Loyola, 
the Monologen of Schleiermacher, these are all manuals 
of the devout life, they belong in the distinctively reli- 
gious world of supersensuous and the transcendent, and 
one thing which accounts for them is that the men who 
produced them were religious geniuses because they were 
also theologians. 1 

It is to be remembered that we are not saying that the 
theologian makes the saint. I do not believe that. Devils 
can believe and tremble ; Abelard was no saint. But we 
are contending that the great saint is extremely likely to 

1 See the "Call to Theology," Har. Theo. Rev., vol. I, no. 1, 
pp. 1 ff. 

224 



WORSHIP AND DISCIPLINE OF DOCTRINE 

be a theologian. Protestantism, Methodism, Tractarian- 
ism, were chiefly religious movements, interested in the 
kind of questions and moved by the sorts of motives 
which we have been talking about. They all began within 
the precincts of universities. Moreover, the Lord Jesus, 
consummate mystic, incomparable artist, was such partly 
because He was a great theologian as well. His dealings 
with scribe and Pharisee furnish some of the world's best 
examples of acute and courageous dialectics. His theo- 
logical method differed markedly from the academicians 
of His day. Nevertheless it was noted that He spoke 
with an extraordinary authority. "He gave," as Dr. Pea- 
body also points out, "new scope and significance to the 
thought of God, to the nature of man, to the destiny of 
the soul, to the meaning of the world. He would have 
been reckoned among the world's great theologians if 
other endowments had not given Him a higher title." 1 

It is a higher title to have been the supreme mystic, the 
perfect seer. All I have been trying to say is that it is to 
these sorts of excellencies that the preacher aspires. But 
the life of Jesus supremely sanctions the conviction that 
preaching upon high and abstract and even speculative 
themes and a rigorous intellectual discipline are chief ac- 
companiments, appropriate and indispensable aids, to re- 
ligious insight and to the cultivating of worshipful feel- 
ing. So we close our discussions with the supreme name 
upon our lips, leaving the most fragrant memory, the 
clearest picture, remembering Him who struck the high- 
est note. It is to His life and teaching that we humbly 
turn to find the final sanction for the distinctively re- 
ligious values. Who else, indeed, has the words of Eternal 
Life? 

1 "Call to Theology," Har. Theo. Rev., vol. I, no. 1, p. 8. 

225 



LYMAN BEECHER LECTURESHIP 
ON PREACHING 

YALE UNIVERSITY 

1871-72 Beecher, H. W., Yale Lectures on Preaching, first 

series. New York, 1872. 
1872-73 Beecher, H. W., Yale Lectures on Preaching, second 

series. New York, 1873. 
1873-74 Beecher, H. W., Yale Lectures on Preaching, third 

series. New York, 1874. 
1874-75 Hall, John, God's Word through Preaching. New York, 

1875. 
1875-76 Taylor, William M., The Ministry of the Word. New 

York, 1876. 
1876-77 Brooks, P., Lectures on Preaching. New York, 1877. 
1877-78 Dale, R. W., Nine Lectures on Preaching. New York, 

1878. 
1878-79 Simpson, M., Lectures on Preaching. New York, 1879. 
1879-80 Crosby, H., The Christian Preacher. New York, 1880. 
1880-81 Duryea, J. T., and others (not published). 
1881-82 Robinson, E. G., Lectures on Preaching. New York, 

1883. 
1882-33 (No lectures.) 
1883-84 Burton, N. J., Yale Lectures on Preaching, and other 

writings. New York, 1888* 
1884-85 Storrs, H. M., The American Preacher (not published). 
1885-86 Taylor, W. M., The Scottish Pulpit. New York, 1887. 
1886-87 Gladden, W., Tools and the Man. Boston, 1893. 
1887-88 Trumbull. H. C., The Sunday School. Philadelphia, 

1888. 
1888-89 Broadus, J. A., Preaching and the Ministerial Life 

(not published). 
1889-90 Behrends, A. J. R, The Philosophy of Preaching. New 

York, 1890. 



227 



LYMAN BEECHER LECTURESHIP 

1890-91 Stalker, J., The Preacher and His Models. New York. 
1891. 

1891-92 Fairbarn, A. M., The Place of Christ in Modern The- 
ology. New York, 1893. 

1892-93 Horton, R. F., Verbum Dei. New York, 1893.* 

1893-94 (No lectures.) 

1894-95 Greer, D. H., The Preacher and His Place. New York, 
1895. 

1895-96 Van Dyke, H., The Gospel for an Age of Doubt. New 
York, 1896.* 

1896-97 Watson, J., The Cure of Souls. New York, 1896. 

1897-98 Tucker. \Y. J., The Making and the Unmaking of the 
Preacher. Boston, 1898. 

1898-99 Smith, G. A.. Modern Criticism and the Old Testa- 
ment. New York, 1901. 

1899-00 Brown, J., Puritan Preaching in England. New York, 
1900. 

1900-01 (No lectures.) 

1901-02 Gladden, W., Social Salvation. New York, 1902. 

1902-03 Gordon, G. A., Ultimate Conceptions of Faith. New 
York, 1903. 

1903-CH Abbott, L., The Christian Ministry. Boston, 1905. 

1904-05 Peabody, F. G., Jesus Christ and the Christian Char- 
acter. N\w York, 1905.* 

1905-06 Brown, C. R., The Social Message of the Modern Pul- 
pit. New York. 1906. 

1906-07 Forsyth, P. T., Positive Preaching and Modern Mind. 
New York, 1908.* 

1907-08 Faunce, W. H. P., The Educational Ideal in the Minis- 
try. New York, 1908. 

1908-09 Henson, H. H., The Liberty of Prophesying. New 
Haven, 1910* 

1909-10 Jefferson, C. E., The Building of the Church. New 
York, 1910. 

1910-11 Gunsaulus, F. W., The Minister and the Spiritual Life. 
New York, Chicago, 1911. 

1911-12 Jowett, J. H., The Preacher; His Life and Work. New 
York, 1912. 

1912-13 Parkhurst, C. H., The Pulpit and the Pew. New Haven. 
1913* 

228 



LYMAN BEECHER LECTURESHIP 

1913-14 Home, C. Silvester, The Romance of Preaching. New 

York, Chicago, 1914. 
1914-15 Pepper, George Wharton, A Voice from the Crowd. 

New Haven, 1915.* 
1915-16 Hyde, William DeWitt, The Gospel of Good Will as 

Revealed in Contemporary Scriptures. New York, 

1916. 
1916-17 McDowell, William Fraser, Good Ministers of Jesus 

Christ. New York and Cincinnati, 1917. 
1917-18 Coffin, Henry Sloane, In a Day of Social Rebuilding. 

New Haven* 
1918-19 Kelman, John, The War and Preaching, New Haven* 
1919-20 Fitch, Albert Parker, Preaching and Paganism. New 

Haven.* 

*Also published in London. 



229 



PRINTED BY E. L. HILDRETH & COMPANY 
BRATTLEBORO, VERMONT, U. S. A. 






Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: Oct. 2005 

PreservationTechnoloqies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 

111 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 
(724)779-2111 



